A Victoria dental clinic, redesigned and rebuilt to load twice as fast
A redesign and rebuild for a dental clinic in Victoria, London. Same brand, new site, moved from WordPress to Next.js. Real visitors on phones now see the page in 1.4 seconds, down from 2.9.
1.4s
Phone load, real visitors (was 2.9s)
hermeslondondentalclinic.com · October 2026
The new homepage, designed and built by Growify Marketing. Live since 14 August 2026.
Speed for real visitors (Google's data)
Twice as fast where it counts.
1.4sPhone load, real visitors (was 2.9s)
1.8sDesktop load, real visitors (was 4.0s)
36Treatment and care pages rebuilt
Where Hermes started.
Hermes London Dental Clinic is on Vauxhall Bridge Road, a short walk from Victoria station. Its website ran on WordPress and had grown slow and dated. When we tested it in July 2026, Google's phone test took 17.9 seconds to show the homepage's main content.
The old site still had plenty worth keeping: years of articles, a page for every treatment, and links from the press. So the brief was a new design and a much faster site, without throwing away what Google already knew about the old one.
55 out of 100 on Google's phone speed test.
A logo that only existed as a small JPEG.
Around 80 pages and 75 blog posts with search history to protect.
Approach
Design first, then the build.
The clinic approved the art direction before we wrote any code. Speed was a rule for every decision after that, from image sizes to when the animation loads.
Design
We kept the brand patients already know from the shopfront and built a new look around it. The logo was redrawn as a clean vector from the old JPEG, and the colours were sampled from the old site and the signage outside.
Art directionLogo redrawn as vectorColour palettePage templates
Build
A Next.js site on Vercel, with the blog in Sanity so new articles go out without a developer. Every treatment has its own page, booking goes straight into the clinic's existing system, and phones get a call and booking bar along the bottom of the screen.
Next.js on VercelSanity blogOnline bookingMobile action bar
Migration and speed
Pages that carried over kept their addresses. The rest got permanent redirects, one hop each. 46 of the 75 blog posts moved across, and the others were merged into stronger articles or retired. Images were resized, map embeds became static images, and the animation loads after the page has painted.
Redirect mapContent migrationImage loadingStructured data
Timeline
From audit to launch.
Jul 2026Audit
A homepage that took 17.9 seconds on a phone
We audited the old site in July 2026. Google's phone test scored the homepage 55 out of 100, with the main content arriving after 17.9 seconds.
Jul 2026Design
Art direction agreed, logo redrawn
The clinic chose an art direction from the options we showed them. We redrew the logo as a vector so it stays sharp on every screen and in print.
Aug 2026Build
Treatments, team, blog and redirects
36 treatment and care pages, 10 team profiles and 46 blog posts in Sanity, with the redirect map built alongside. Before launch, 109 pages were checked for a single main heading, a canonical tag and valid structured data.
Aug 2026Launch
The new site goes live on 14 August
We switched the domain over on 14 August 2026 and checked the redirects the same night: all permanent, all a single hop, all landing on a live page.
Oct 2026Where we are
Real visitors get the page twice as fast
Google's data from real visitors now puts the main content on a phone screen in 1.4 seconds, down from 2.9 seconds before the rebuild. We run the clinic's SEO now too, and we'll add search results here once there is enough data to be fair about them.
1.4sand still measuring
Speed in detail
Before and after, from real visitors.
From Google's Chrome UX Report, which collects load times from real Chrome users. Before is the 28 days up to 14 July 2026 on the old WordPress site; after is the 28 days up to 13 October 2026 on the new one. Each figure is the 75th percentile: three in four visits were at least this fast.
1.4sPhone, main content on screen
Down from 2.9 seconds. Google counts anything under 2.5 seconds as good.
1.8sDesktop, main content on screen
Down from 4.0 seconds, which Google rated as poor.
0.43sPhone, first response from the server
Down from 0.96 seconds.
0.02Desktop, layout shift
Down from 0.24. This measures how much the page jumps around while it loads. Under 0.1 is good.