Table of Contents
Our website redesign process: why we rebuilt instead of patched
Our previous site had grown the way most sites do, one plugin and one page builder block at a time. It looked acceptable, but under the hood it carried the accumulated weight of years: render-blocking stylesheets, redundant JavaScript, and a page builder that shipped markup no human would ever write by hand. For a sustainability marketing agency, an energy-hungry, sluggish website is a credibility problem, not just a technical one. We considered the usual route: install a caching plugin, a performance plugin, an image plugin, and paper over the cracks. But you cannot optimize your way out of a foundation that is heavy by design. Page builders trade a small amount of convenience for a large, permanent performance tax. So for this website redesign process we made the harder decision and started from a blank file.The design system
For this website redesign, we wanted the site to feel like the outdoors it champions: grounded, natural, and quietly premium. The palette is built on a deep forest ink, a fresh lime-green accent, and a supporting violet, with generous negative space so the work can breathe. The site ships in a dark, cinematic theme by default and offers a true light mode that is one tap away, with the theme choice remembered between visits. Typography is a single, self-hosted family (Inter) in a tight range of weights, which keeps the type crisp while avoiding the cost of loading multiple font files from a third party. Every design token, from color to spacing to type scale, lives in CSS custom properties, so the whole system stays consistent and is trivial to theme for light and dark at once.Architecture: a hand-coded theme, not a page builder
The heart of the project is a custom WordPress theme written by hand in PHP, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript. There is no Elementor, no drag-and-drop builder, and no library of design plugins. Each template, the homepage, the six service pages, the portfolio archive and case studies, the blog index and single post, the tools, follows WordPress’s native template hierarchy and renders exactly the markup we intend and nothing else. That discipline pays off everywhere. Assets are enqueued deliberately rather than dumped globally, so a page only loads the CSS and JavaScript it actually uses. The blog index is a real, paginated query rather than a hardcoded list, so it scales as we publish. The portfolio uses a custom post type with clean, stable URLs. Nothing is generated by a black box, which means nothing is heavier than it needs to be.Performance engineering
Speed was the non-negotiable brief for the website redesign, and it is not an accident or a plugin setting. It is the sum of dozens of small, deliberate choices.- Self-hosted fonts. Inter is served as preloaded woff2 files from our own domain with a swap strategy, so text paints immediately and never blocks rendering while waiting on a font server.
- Next-gen, right-sized images. Every image is compressed WebP with explicit width and height attributes and responsive srcset sets, so the browser downloads the smallest file that fits the viewport and never reflows the layout while images load.
- A discoverable LCP. The hero image is preloaded with a high fetch priority so the largest element on the page starts downloading in the first moments of the request rather than after the browser has parsed halfway down the document.
- Deferred analytics. Google Analytics does not load on first paint. A tiny stub queues events and the full script only loads on the first real interaction, or after a few seconds, whichever comes first. That single decision removes a large chunk of main-thread work and forced reflow from the critical path.
- No render-blocking bloat. Because there is no page builder, there is no cascade of builder stylesheets and no jQuery-heavy widget soup. Critical styles are inlined where it helps, and scripts are lean and event-driven.
Motion and interaction, without the jank
The site has a considered layer of motion: smooth scrolling, elements that reveal as they enter the viewport, and subtle depth on key sections. All of it is built on an IntersectionObserver-driven reveal system and a lightweight smooth-scroll layer, rather than a heavy animation library loaded on every page. Every effect respects the operating system’s reduced-motion preference, and touch devices get their own event paths so nothing that depends on a mouse hover silently breaks on a phone. Motion should feel effortless, and effortless is engineering, not luck.Forms with no third-party plugin
Contact, project quote, newsletter, and the resource downloads are all handled by code we wrote, not a form plugin. Each submission is protected by a WordPress nonce and a honeypot field to stop spam, posts through the platform’s own admin-post handler, and is stored as a private custom post type inside WordPress with a clean admin table, filtering, and CSV export. That means no external form service, no extra scripts on the page, no data leaving our control, and one less plugin to slow the site down or become a security liability.
The AI assistant, done safely
The friendly toucan in the corner, Toco, is a real AI assistant powered by a modern language model. The important part is how it is wired. The browser never sees an API key. Every message passes through a server-side proxy on our own domain that holds the credential, enforces per-visitor and global rate limits, keeps a transcript, and returns only the model’s reply. When the assistant identifies a genuine lead, it hands that lead straight into the same automation pipeline the rest of the site uses. It is helpful to visitors, and it is defensive by design.The tool that proves the point: the carbon checker
A modern site should do more than describe services, so we built a first-party tool directly into the platform. The Website Carbon Checker is a genuinely first-party tool: its own REST endpoint on our server fetches a target page, sums the weight of its assets, checks whether the host runs on green energy, and estimates emissions using the Sustainable Web Design model. It is server-side, guarded against abuse, and cached. A sustainability agency should be able to measure carbon, not just talk about it, so we built the instrument to do exactly that and made it public.The automation layer behind the scenes
The most valuable part of our website redesign process is the part visitors never see. Every lead, whether it arrives through a form, the chatbot, or the audit, flows into a self-hosted, open-source automation engine through webhooks. From there the system does the work a busy team forgets to do: it sends the visitor an instant, branded email, adds them to the right marketing audience, alerts us, writes the lead into a single unified board so nothing is scattered across inboxes, and enrolls audit leads into a multi-step nurture sequence that follows up automatically over the following days. The design principle is simple. The machine handles what is repetitive and time-sensitive, capture and follow-up, and a human handles what only a human should, the actual conversation and the close. No sticky notes, no forgotten inquiries, no lead falling through the cracks at 11pm on a Friday.Found by Google and by AI
A website redesign is only worth it if people can find it, so discoverability was engineered, not hoped for. The templates output semantic, accessible HTML with a clear heading structure, which both search engines and screen readers rely on. Structured data marks up the organization, its location, article authorship, and frequently asked questions, so search engines can present the site richly. Sitemaps are generated and submitted, canonical URLs are clean and stable, and legacy URLs from the old site are redirected one to one so no ranking equity is lost. We also publish a machine-readable summary file specifically for the AI crawlers that now feed answer engines, because increasingly the first place a buyer meets your brand is inside an AI answer, not a blue link.Accessibility and security as first-class concerns
The site scores at the top for accessibility because it was built that way: sufficient color contrast in both themes, real landmarks and ARIA where it helps, keyboard-navigable components, captions on video, and full respect for reduced-motion. Accessibility is not a compliance checkbox, it is simply a better experience for everyone. On security, we hardened the platform rather than trusting defaults: the administrative entry point is moved off its well-known location, legacy remote endpoints that attackers routinely probe are disabled, and server-level protective headers are in place. Fewer plugins also means a smaller attack surface, which is a quiet benefit of the hand-built approach.Sustainable by construction
Sustainability is easy to claim and hard to prove, so we designed this website redesign process to prove it. The lean, no-bloat codebase means fewer bytes travel across the network on every visit, and fewer bytes mean less energy and a smaller carbon footprint per page view. Our own Website Carbon Checker keeps us honest and is available for anyone to test their own site. A website that loads fast and weighs little is not only better for users and for search, it is measurably better for the planet, and for a sustainability agency those goals finally point in the same direction.What this means for purpose-driven brands
Here is the honest takeaway from our website redesign process. Most eco brands pour everything into their mission and then quietly lose potential buyers to a clunky, slow website, weak search visibility, and manual busywork that never quite gets done. The same website redesign process we ran on our own site, the hand-built performance, the discoverability, the tools, and the automation, is exactly what we bring to a client engagement. The goal is never a prettier brochure. It is a website that is fast, that Google and AI engines can find and recommend, that turns visitors into customers, and that runs quiet automations in the background so your team can spend its hours on the work only it can do.See it for yourself
Take a look around the new planetmediallc.com, and if you want to know exactly where your own brand stands, send us your website and get a plan and a quote within 24 hours, no call required.
Kurt Whitt
Planet Media
Founder and CEO of Planet Media, a sustainability focused marketing agency. 25+ years helping purpose driven brands grow through strategy, storytelling and design.
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