DLT Roofing Limited had outgrown its website. The existing site ran on Joomla with a YOOtheme page builder — a stack that tied every layout decision to a template the business didn't control, made routine content changes slower than they needed to be, and left the company carrying the maintenance risk of an ageing platform.

The commercial problem sat underneath the technical one. DLT is NFRC certified, a Which? Trusted Trader, and takes on listed and conservation work that most roofers won't touch — including jobs requiring ecology surveys and bat-compliant detailing. None of that came through. In a Leicester market where visibility is won on depth and trust signals, the site was thin where it needed to be authoritative, and invisible to the structured data and AI-answer surfaces that increasingly sit between a homeowner and a roofer.

A complete ground-up rebuild in Next.js, hosted on Vercel with a dedicated staging environment so every change could be reviewed in context before it reached the public site.

The content architecture was rebuilt around the way people actually search for a roofer: individual service pages for flat, pitched, chimneys, roofline, drone surveys and listed and conservation work; location pages for the areas DLT covers; a guides library; and case studies that carry real before-and-after photography from completed jobs. Trust signals that had been somewhat buried — NFRC certification, Which? Trusted Trader status, the written 10–25 year workmanship guarantee — were brought to the surface and marked up.

Technical work ran alongside the build. A full structured data layer was implemented for AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) readiness. Performance was audited throughout using a custom Puppeteer and Lighthouse harness.

Two migration comparison reports tracked the old and new sites page by page throughout the project to keep a focus on the maintaining the excellent new Lighthouse scores, and a complete 301 redirect map was built from the Joomla URL structure so absolutely nothing was lost in the move.

Benchmarked against five direct competitors in the Leicester roofing market, the new site leads on structured data implementation, AEO readiness and content depth — the three areas that determine whether a business gets surfaced by search and AI answer engines rather than skipped over.

Just as importantly, DLT now owns what it paid for. The codebase, the content and the deployment pipeline belong to the business, not to a theme vendor or a platform licence. Adding a service, opening a new area page or publishing a guide is a content change, not a redesign.

The site launched on 2 September 2026, with the full 301 redirect map already in place to carry existing search equity across from the Joomla URLs.

[Post-launch performance figures to be added once the first full month of Search Console data is available.]