Patinos Personal Lawyers’ new website went live today. Check it out at patinos.com.au.

I’ve worked with Patinos for more than a decade — we’ve built a few websites for them since 2014 and have helped with their digital marketing strategy since then. The clear goal (as with all our client projects) is to make a difference to the bottom line by connecting the firm with the people who are looking for exactly what they provide.

When we reviewed the performance data on the previous site, we found that the mobile version loaded far more slowly than it should have. Partly a design problem, partly the platform underneath it (SquareSpace is nice for editing, not so nice for performance or SEO).

So for this build we set out to make the site fast first — it’s a mobile first design built with Astro and served via Cloudflare pages. The site now loads several times faster on a mobile and even quicker on a laptop/computer.

The pages are built ahead of time and ready to serve when someone visits. We also reduced the weight of the images and improved how they load on different screens.

In mobile performance tests post build, the motor vehicle accident page for example, loaded in 1.2 seconds, down from 15.9 seconds on the old site.

But the performance side was only part of it. The client also needed to be able to update the site themselves from time to time.

This time we flipped the usual approach around. We built the site to be fast, then chose a CMS as a layer on top, rather than the foundation. Sitepins gives the team an editing interface for the site’s content, without adding weight to the pages visitors see.

The result loads quickly, looks more professional, and will represent the business well for years to come.