Case Study · Custom WordPress · Local SEO

Elite Pro Painting

A custom WordPress rebuild for an Indianapolis painting contractor: a championship rebrand wired for local search, lead capture that never drops a name, and a mission that feeds kids.

Role
Design & Full-Stack WordPress Development
Timeline
Sep 2025 – Aug 2026
Industry
Home Services · Painting
  • 4.9 Google rating out of 5
  • 590 Google reviews synced live from Google
  • 97 Mobile PageSpeed was 49
  • 85% Lighter build 6 GB → 1 GB
  • 57 Local landing pages 32 cities + 25 neighborhoods

The brief

A Trusted Painter, Invisible Online

Elite Pro Painting had the reputation (a 4.9-star rating, 590 Google reviews, and nearly two decades of work) but a generic Avada template that buried it. The site was slow, hard to update, and invisible for the local searches that actually drive painting work. Estimate requests trickled in through a form that went nowhere near their scheduling system.

They were also mid-rebrand. The goal was singular: build a fast, self-managed site that ranks in every neighborhood they serve and turns a "free estimate" click into a job on the calendar, while giving their community mission the spotlight it deserved.

What the old site was doing to the business

  • The old site used Avada's page builder with unoptimized JavaScript, heavy sliders, and poor configuration: 40+ seconds to load on mobile, a 49/100 score, and failing Core Web Vitals.
  • A 6GB install with zero image optimization: slow to load, expensive to host.
  • Duplicate and contradicting copy (“16,000 clients” and “10,000 clients” on the same page) plus multiple H1s confused Google. The rebuild unified every count to a single “Over 20,000” projects.
  • Inconsistent name/address/phone against Google Business, thin meta data, and keyword cannibalization dragging local rankings down.
  • A contact form that went nowhere near the scheduling system, so leads landed in an inbox, not on the calendar.

The rebrand

From Painters to Champions

Elite Pro was rebuilding its identity around a racing idea: winners, first place, the checkered flag. Over two homepage concepts we tuned it to the owner's instinct: clean lines and solid color instead of busy paint textures, a stationary checkerboard rather than moving parts, more of the signature pink, and "Eppy," the paint-brush mascot, redrawn to stay crisp when shrunk into a header.

The result reads bold and high-energy without tipping into gimmick: a family-owned painting company that looks like the category leader it already is.

Eppy, the Elite Pro Painting paint-brush mascot
"Eppy", redrawn for the header

Scroll to compare

One Scroll, Both Homepages

Keep scrolling and both homepages travel top to bottom together, edge to edge. Stop anywhere to hold the frame.

Before · Avada
Full-length screenshot of the old Elite Pro Painting homepage
After · Custom theme
Full-length screenshot of the rebuilt Elite Pro Painting homepage

The mission

Every Project Feeds a Child

Elite Pro donates meals to Indianapolis kids with every job. Instead of a line in the footer, we built it into the page as a number that grows while you watch: seeded at 185,000, climbing 4,100 every month, and remembered in your browser so it never resets to zero. The owner updates it from WordPress; nobody touches code.

Meals donated to Indianapolis children +4,100 every month · counting up live

“Every Painting Project Feeds an Indianapolis Child.”

What I built

Five Systems Doing the Heavy Lifting

Reusable ACF content sections composing a page

Editing without code

A section library the team runs themselves

The whole site is built from a library of ACF-powered content sections: heroes, service grids, review walls, before/after collections, FAQs, checkerboards. The owner reorders and reuses them from WordPress like Lego, with no page-builder bloat and no developer on standby. New service areas and galleries go live the same day.

Multi-step estimate form syncing partial entries to a CRM

Lead capture

An estimate form that never loses a lead

Every “Get a Free Estimate” button opens the same lightbox form and quietly records which page it came from. The moment a visitor types their name and email, a lead is created in the client’s Workiz CRM before they finish. Later steps enrich that same record with phone and address, so a half-finished form is still a follow-up, not a lost customer. Booking hands off to Acuity Scheduling.

Painters near me, everywhere they work

  • Anderson
  • Avon
  • Bargersville
  • Bloomington
  • Brownsburg
  • Carmel
  • Center Grove
  • Coatesville / Heritage Lake
  • Columbus
  • Danville
  • Fishers
  • Franklin
  • Geist
  • Greencastle
  • Greenfield
  • Greenwood
  • Indianapolis
  • Kokomo
  • Lafayette
  • Lawrence
  • Lebanon
  • McCordsville
  • Muncie
  • Nashville
  • Noblesville
  • Pendleton
  • Plainfield
  • Speedway
  • Westfield
  • Whiteland
  • Whitestown
  • Zionsville
  • Austin Oaks
  • Breakwater
  • Brendonwood
  • Bridlebourne
  • Canal Place
  • Chatham Hills
  • Crooked Stick Estates
  • Crow's Nest
  • Gray Eagle
  • Hamilton Proper
  • Holliday Farms
  • Irishman's Run
  • Lochhaven
  • Meridian Hills
  • Meridian Kessler Estate Stretch
  • Old Northside
  • Saddleridge Estates
  • Sagamore
  • The Bridgewater Club
  • The Springs of Cambridge
  • Thorpe Creek
  • Traders Point
  • Village of WestClay Estate Sections
  • Williams Creek
  • Windemere

Local SEO

A page for every place they serve

32 city and service-area pages plus 25 neighborhood pages, each with localized copy and LocalBusiness structured data, so “painters near me” across the metro lands on a page built for that exact suburb. We kept the existing URL structure, added 301s, fixed the NAP inconsistencies, and untangled the keyword cannibalization to protect years of hard-won ranking.

Interactive Google map of served neighborhoods with filters

Interactive map

A neighborhood map you can actually explore

The neighborhood explorer is a live Google Map with custom markers, info windows, and filters by service type and city. Because map data hides from search crawlers, it’s paired with a plain, crawlable grid of the same places. Visitors get the interactive view, Google gets every page it needs to index.

Before and after performance scores

Under the hood

From forty seconds to fast

The bloated Avada theme came out; a hand-built Bootstrap 5 theme went in. Content was migrated by hand out of the old builder, images re-served as WebP, above-the-fold CSS inlined, oversized image variants trimmed, scripts deferred, and SiteGround caching tuned. Mobile PageSpeed went from 49 to 97, the install shrank from 6GB to 1GB, and Core Web Vitals went green.

How it came together

From Audit to Launch, and Beyond

  1. Discovery & audit

    A full front-end audit pinned the problem: the Avada builder was the bottleneck. From there we mapped every service and service area and fixed the site on one job: turning local searches into booked estimates.

  2. Brand & design

    Across two homepage concepts we shaped the client’s championship rebrand: clean lines over busy textures, a stationary checkered flag, the signature pink, “1st place” voice, and “Eppy,” the paint-brush mascot, redrawn to stay legible in a header.

  3. Custom build

    Developed the custom theme with Bootstrap 5, SCSS and a Grunt pipeline, and an ACF-driven section library the team could edit. All copy and posts were migrated out of Avada by hand so nothing displayed broken in the new layouts.

  4. Forms, CRM & mission

    Wired the multi-step estimate funnel to Workiz with partial-entry capture, added the live before/after sliders and Fancybox galleries, and built the ticking meals-donated counter and self-updating figures.

  5. Local SEO & launch

    Added schema, sitemaps and 301s, fixed five broken Google Ads landing pages, sorted email deliverability, and went live in June 2026 behind a maintenance page, then kept building with new location and neighborhood rollouts.

Under the hood

The Stack, Layer by Layer

  1. Platform

    • WordPress
    • ACF Pro
    • Custom Post Types
    • Classic Editor

  2. Front-end

    • Bootstrap 5.3
    • SCSS
    • Grunt
    • jQuery
    • Fancybox
    • img-comparison-slider

  3. Integrations

    • Gravity Forms
    • Partial Entries
    • Workiz CRM API
    • Acuity Scheduling
    • Google Maps API
    • Yoast SEO

  4. Performance & SEO

    • WebP Express
    • SiteGround caching
    • Critical CSS
    • LocalBusiness schema
    • Core Web Vitals

The outcome

A Foundation that Books Work

  • Mobile PageSpeed up from 49 to 97, 40+ second loads gone, and Core Web Vitals back in the green.
  • An 85% lighter site, 6GB down to 1GB, that loads faster on phones and costs less to host.
  • A 4.9★ rating and 590 Google reviews put front-and-center as the trust signals they earned.
  • 57 local landing pages (32 cities + 25 neighborhoods) live and built for local search.
  • A site the team edits themselves: new areas, galleries and the meal counter update with no developer.
  • Every estimate captured the moment it starts and synced to Workiz, so drop-offs still become follow-ups.
  • A partnership, not a one-off: launch was followed by more location and neighborhood page rollouts.

Have a business that deserves this kind of attention?

Every site I build gets the same treatment: a brand that looks the part, real performance, and a plan for how it earns its keep.

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