The situation
This is a small vacation rental business in Hawaii: surf-stay rentals that guests book directly by sending an inquiry. No big booking platform in the middle. Just a good-looking site, some honest photos, and a form that goes straight to the owner.
That kind of business lives and dies on first impressions. People are planning a trip, usually on their phone, comparing a handful of places. The site has to feel like the place, and it has to show up fast.
It felt like the place. It did not show up fast.
What they needed
- A site that sells the stay: big photos, a video of the space, the location, what's included
- Pages that show up for the things travelers actually search for
- An inquiry form that's easy to fill out and easy to act on
- To stop losing time to spam and repeat submissions
- Above all, a home page that loads on a phone without making anyone wait
What I built
The site has a home page led by a short video of the rentals, a page with photo galleries for each one, a location page, an about page and a contact page. I also added a few landing pages aimed at the searches people really type when they're looking for a surf rental on the islands, so the site has more than one door in from Google.
Every inquiry is saved to a database first, then copied into the dashboard I use to keep an eye on all my clients' sites, then emailed to the owner. A hiccup with the email or the dashboard never stops an inquiry from being saved.
The weight problem
My weekly check flagged the home page. Google PageSpeed said the main content was taking around 30 seconds to appear on a phone, and when I opened the full report, the page weighed 19.8MB.
Nothing was broken. It was four files:
- A 12.1MB background video
- A 3.83MB still image shown while that video loads
- A 3.24MB gallery photo
- A 7.69MB background photo used on two pages
The photos had been saved as PNG files, a format meant for logos and graphics, not photographs. Converting them to WebP, a modern format built for photos, with no visible difference, took them from megabytes to kilobytes:
- Video still image: 3.83MB to 261KB
- Gallery photo: 3.24MB to 100KB
- Background photo: 7.69MB to 120KB
One decision I'm proud of
The video. The easy fix would have been to delete it. But the video is the best thing on the page. It shows the inside of the rentals better than any photo could.
So I kept it and did the slower thing. I re-encoded it at a few different quality levels and compared frames side by side with the original until I found the smallest one I couldn't tell apart. It went from 12.1MB to 3.77MB, still full HD. I also set it up so the lightweight still image carries the first moment on screen, and the video doesn't hold the page up.
The site kept its best feature, and visitors stopped waiting for it.
The form
While I was in there, I found two problems with the inquiry form.
First, bots were filling it out, often the same inquiry three times a few seconds apart. Of 52 stored inquiries, 34 were repeats of 18 real ones. I added two quiet defenses that real visitors never notice: a hidden field only bots fill in, and a limit on how many times one visitor can submit in a minute.
Second, an email setting was missing, so the form was saving each inquiry but then telling the visitor it had failed. That gave people every reason to try again. Now a mail problem gets logged for me to fix, and the visitor always sees the truth: it went through.
I also replaced the free-text date and guest boxes with a date range calendar and a guest dropdown. Inquiries now arrive with something like "Aug 18 to Aug 25 (7 nights)" and a guest count, instead of "sometime in july, 2 adults."
The results
Measured with Google PageSpeed (mobile):
- Home page weight: 19.8MB down to 4.4MB
- Mobile performance: usually 73 or 74 before the fix (a few runs scored higher, so results swung a lot), and between 88 and 100 on every check since
- Largest Contentful Paint (how long until the main content shows): about 30 seconds before, between 0.9 and 3.7 seconds since
- SEO and best practices: 100 throughout
The form side is better too: it now screens out the bots, and dates arrive in a shape the owner can read at a glance.
What this means for your business
- A beautiful site can still be a slow one. Big photos and video are worth it, as long as they're prepared for the web. Ask what format your photos are saved in. If the answer is PNG, there's probably an easy win.
- You don't have to give up what you love to get speed. There's almost always a way to keep the video, the gallery or the big hero image and still load fast.
- Check that your form tells the truth. Fill out your own contact form once in a while. If it errors, or you never get the email, you may be losing inquiries without knowing it.
- Structured fields save back-and-forth. A calendar and a dropdown mean fewer "which dates did you mean?" emails.
Curious about your own site?
If you run a rental, a guesthouse or anything people book from far away, I'd love to take a look. You can run a free speed and SEO check at mewebsites.com/audit, or tell me about your business at mewebsites.com/start. No pressure at all. Even if you just want to know where you stand, I'm happy to help.
