Roofing contractor, Leicester

DLT Roofing: off end-of-life Joomla, onto a site they own

A Leicester roofer’s site scored 14.5 out of 50 against five local rivals — bottom of the market. A Next.js rebuild the business owns outright now scores 43, seven clear of the nearest competitor.

DLT Roofing Limited Launched GroundWork Build Open the site

DLT Roofing Limited website

01 Finding

Scored against five Leicester roofers on five things — what the site actually says, how Google reads it, showing up for Leicester searches, getting quoted by AI assistants, turning visitors into calls — DLT’s old Joomla site came in at 14.5 out of 50, bottom of the market. The things that set DLT apart were nowhere on it: NFRC certification, Which? Trusted Trader status, a written 10–25 year guarantee, listed and conservation work with bat-compliant detailing. Three of the five rivals published no structured data at all, and the one real threat had a page for every service and thirty-odd named towns — thin, but a lot of it.

02 Decision

Rebuild the content around how people actually search for a roofer — a page per service (flat, pitched, chimneys, roofline, drone surveys, listed and conservation), area pages only where DLT has genuinely worked, guides and case studies with real before-and-after photography — and have a roofer write it: how to spot a properly sealed seam, why a cold deck needs to breathe, why a roof gets looked at before it gets priced. Hand Google the facts rather than leave it to guess (company and VAT numbers, hours, accreditations, areas, all as RoofingContractor structured data). Move to a codebase, content and deployment pipeline the business owns, with a complete 301 map from the Joomla URLs so nothing was lost.

03 Outcome

  • 14.5 → 43 out of 50Website benchmark, Leicester roofing marketOld site → new site. Nearest rival 36. Five sites scored on content, technical build, local search, AI answer readiness and enquiries, August 2026

  • Google Lighthouse audit

    All four scores reached 100
    Category Before After
    Performance 88 100
    Accessibility 98 100
    Best practices 95 100
    SEO 90 100

  • AI scorecard

    The old site failed both checks; the new site passes both
    Category Before After
    Agentic browsing 0/2 2/2
    Lighthouse 13 agentic browsing audit
  • 5Schema types on every page — RoofingContractor, Service, Place, Article, FAQPageThree of five rivals publish no structured data at all
  • 0URLs lost or minutes of downtime at migrationFull 301 map from the Joomla structure

01 The challenge

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.

02 The work

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.

DLT Roofing Limited project image

03 The outcome

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.]

DLT Roofing Limited homepage, full page
Homepage preview — DLT Roofing Limited

“Mark has looked after our website (and our many other IT issues) for several years now and has just launched our brand new website today! He made the whole process so easy, we'd be lost without his expertise. An incredibly lovely man who provides an incredibly professional service, at an incredibly decent price. Thank you Mark, for answering all of my questions, for encouraging the micro changes and for helping us to dream bigger and better!”

Connie Towl , Director & Office Manager, DLT Roofing Limited