A builder's website has to say who he is, what he does, where he works and how to reach him, and show enough of the work to make the phone call feel safe. Everything else it does is weight. CJW Building Services, a small firm in Pershore, Worcestershire, established in 2012 and in the trade since 2004, covers landscaping, building, groundwork and the odd jobs around a house, and its site had always been one page. The question was not what more the page could do but how much of what it was doing could be taken away.
We had built and hosted the firm's previous site, on a managed content platform that carried a cookie banner, a contact form behind a bot check, fonts and icons fetched from other people's servers, and seventeen scripts and nine stylesheets for a page whose content never changed. On Saturday 1 August 2026 it was rebuilt from a specification whose eight open questions were answered that day, under an agreement drafted, sent and signed the same day. The whole first pass went in over the one evening, seventeen items from sign-off to a verified deployment: the content finalised against an inventory of every fact on the old site, the images optimised, a proper set of icons and a social preview card, an accessibility pass, a repository, a hosting project with a working preview, a cross-device check and the performance gate.
What the firm has now
One page, a privacy page and a not-found page, written by hand as plain files with no build step and nothing to generate them. The page runs no script at all: the only script tag on it is the structured data a search engine reads for a construction business, and it is data, not code. The fonts are the visitor's own system fonts, the icons are drawn inline, and the page makes no request to any other domain, so it sets no cookies and needs no banner; the cookie policy was retired rather than maintained. There is no contact form. The firm's enquiries had always been better by phone, so the form, the bot check that guarded it and the spam that came through it all went, and a visitor taps the mobile number, the office number or the email address instead. Every address the old site had redirects to its new home, and the page carries the title, description and social preview the old one never had.
The page weighs under six hundred kilobytes, almost all of it the firm's own photographs; the markup and the stylesheet together are twenty-five kilobytes. It scores full marks in all four of the standard audit's categories, on a phone and on a desktop, and the accessibility pass measured the text colour pairings rather than sampling them, with the tightest, the brand red on cream, clearing the threshold. It was checked at five widths from a small phone to a wide desktop and on two real phones before it went anywhere near the domain.
The cheapest hour in a migration
Before anything was asked to move, the zone the site was leaving was audited in full: every record type, across the bare domain and two dozen hostnames a zone like it might carry, read from the authoritative nameserver rather than a control panel's list, and then confirmed complete against the panel, because a sweep from outside cannot prove a negative. The zone had not changed since June 2017. Each record was given a fate: the old host's web and mail records to drop, one record to keep verbatim, the search console's proof of ownership, which is the kind of thing a migration loses without noticing. The mail question was put to the firm first. It had never used a mailbox on the domain, so the mail records went too, and in their place the new zone says so to the world: a null mail record, a sender policy that authorises no server, and a reject policy, so that nobody can forge mail from the firm's domain and have it believed.
— On zones —An audit of the zone you are about to leave is the cheapest hour in a migration, and the one most often skipped.
An hour on a Sunday
A complete copy of the old site, files and database, was taken first and archived offline with its checksum, so that nothing from nine years of the old site could be lost. The new zone was then built as a transition: the same addresses the old host had, so that changing the delegation changed nothing for a visitor, and checked record by record against both of the new nameservers before the switch. The nameservers were changed at the registrar and the change confirmed at the registry itself; the two hostnames were attached to the hosting project, certificates issued, and the www address set to redirect to the bare one with its path intact. Everything was verified with the checks pinned to the new edge rather than to whatever a local cache remembered: the redirects, the not-found page, no cookie on any response, a single script tag, and the plain email link. The host's own default of rewriting email addresses with a script was switched off, because the page was built to have no scripts and that is not a thing to lose by default. The whole move took under an hour.
Then nothing happened for eleven days, on purpose. The old host was left untouched throughout, so that going back would have been a single change at the registrar, and the soak closed clean: no error spikes, no rollback needed. Only then was the old hosting cancelled, with the confirmation filed. In between, a one-page note in plain English went to the firm on what had changed and how to ask for changes, and the first such request arrived within the week: ten new photographs of recent jobs, which became a new mosaic and new pictures on every section, and left the page lighter than before. Since October an external monitor fetches the page every five minutes and tells us, not the firm, if it ever stops answering.
Held for the firm
The arrangement is written down in plain terms, with a summary at the top that says the same things in fewer words. The domain is registered through our account for convenience and held for the firm's benefit; the agreement names the firm as its beneficial owner, and it transfers on request, at any time, without obstruction. The firm's name, logo, photographs and words are its own. The code is ours, and the firm holds a perpetual licence to it, with a complete copy of the repository on request or at the end. Either side can end the arrangement on thirty days' notice. Because the site collects no personal data at all, sets no cookies and has no form, the data-protection clause is a paragraph and the privacy notice is short, and both say so plainly.
What the firm has, then, is a page that is faster, lighter and quieter than the one it replaced, that asks nothing of anyone from one year to the next, that keeps no one's details because it never takes any, and that it could move elsewhere in an afternoon, domain and all, with nothing to migrate but a folder of files.