Apex Manufacturing
ManufacturingA modern web presence for a national precision manufacturing company, rebuilt from WordPress for speed, SEO dominance, and lead generation.
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The Challenge
Apex Manufacturing had been running a WordPress site built in 2019 with a commercial theme and over 30 active plugins. The site took 7.1 seconds to load on mobile and scored a 28 on Google PageSpeed Performance. The theme generated over 2MB of unused CSS and JavaScript on every page load. Their bounce rate had crept up to 68%, and the RFQ form buried three clicks deep was converting at just 1.2%. Potential clients in aerospace, medical devices, and automotive were leaving before they ever saw Apex's certifications or capability list. The WordPress admin panel had become a liability — plugin conflicts caused the site to go down twice in six months, and a failed update once wiped the homepage entirely. For a company whose reputation is built on precision and reliability, the website told a different story.
Our Solution
We rebuilt Apex on Next.js with a dark steel-blue design system that matches the industrial precision of their work. Every page is statically generated — no server, no database, no PHP. The 9-page site includes dedicated sections for each of their six capabilities, five industry verticals, a quality process walkthrough, and a prominent RFQ form accessible from every page. We implemented proper image optimization with lazy loading, purged all unused CSS through Tailwind's build process, and structured every page with JSON-LD schema data targeting manufacturing-specific search queries. The contact form uses client-side validation with honeypot spam protection — no reCAPTCHA friction, no third-party scripts slowing down the page. Build-time rendering means the HTML is ready before the browser even asks for it.
Results
Google PageSpeed Performance jumped from 28 to 100 — a perfect score across all four Lighthouse categories. Load time dropped from 7.1 seconds to 0.6 seconds. The bounce rate fell from 68% to 34% as visitors engaged with the capabilities and project showcase content. RFQ form conversions increased from 1.2% to 4.8% — a 4x improvement — driven by the form's visibility and the elimination of page-load friction. Organic search traffic grew 52% within 90 days, with Apex now ranking on page one for three competitive manufacturing keywords they had never appeared for. The site has had zero downtime since launch, compared to two outages in the final six months on WordPress. Apex's sales team reports that prospects now arrive to calls already familiar with their certifications and capabilities.
Technologies Used
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