Portfolio / Global Ritual Group

Case study · technical SEO · Performance · YMYL · 45 URLs

From 60 on mobile to 96 — without losing forms, chat or SEO

GRG operates in the sensitive field of international repatriation, where people search for help on a phone and cannot afford to wait. We accelerated the site, consolidated its technical SEO foundation and preserved forms, analytics, chat and visual identity.

GEO: Ukraine + Europe Sector: international repatriation Scope: technical SEO + performance Stack: HTML · Apache · WebP

60 → 96PageSpeed Performance · mobile

91 → 100PageSpeed Performance · desktop

9.9 → 2.1 slab LCP · mobile

45 / 45sitemap URLs respond with 200 OK

Where it started

A 24/7 service with a mobile page that took too long to become useful

For GRG, the website is not a corporate brochure. It is the first point of contact for a family urgently looking for a route, documents and a responsible coordinator.

The website already had a confident visual identity and a broad structure of service and country pages. The problem was underneath: a heavy first screen, externally hosted fonts, early third-party scripts and several technical details were stretching the critical rendering path.

The impact was most visible on mobile: Performance 60, FCP 4.5 s and LCP 9.9 s in the Lighthouse lab test. In parallel, canonical tags, sitemap, robots, redirects, metadata and structured data had to be checked for indexing risks.

The constraint mattered: make the site faster without removing business-critical functionality, breaking forms, chat, analytics or consent — and without corrupting Ukrainian text encoding.

Diagnosis

The audit showed that critical resources — not page count — were slowing the experience

We matched PageSpeed findings against network dependencies, HTML templates, the sitemap and live server responses. This produced a short list of high-impact, low-risk changes.

Heavy hero image

The original first-screen JPG weighed 445,619 bytes and served the same asset to every screen.

External fonts

Google Fonts introduced render-blocking CSS and another third-party dependency before first paint.

Third-party JavaScript

GTM, reCAPTCHA and chat could start before a visitor needed or consented to their function.

Accessibility

Contrast, missing select labels and small touch targets reduced mobile usability scores.

Canonicalisation

Clean URLs, .html redirects, canonical tags and internal links needed an end-to-end consistency check.

Encoding

Ukrainian content required explicit UTF-8 checks in source files, HTTP headers and XML output.

An honest baseline

The “before” and “after” figures come from two saved PageSpeed Insights reports dated 20 July 2026. These are lab measurements, so a separate run may return a different score. What matters is the consistent metric shift and the removal of the underlying causes.

What we changed

Six controlled improvements instead of a “magic” optimisation plugin

Every stage could be tested in isolation and rolled back without rebuilding the website.

STEP 01

Recorded the baseline

Mobile and desktop PageSpeed, live URL responses, head tags, sitemap, robots and visual checkpoints.

STEP 02

Rebuilt media delivery

Heavy JPG/PNG assets became responsive WebP with explicit dimensions and no layout shift.

STEP 03

Self-hosted fonts

Inter and Playfair Display moved to local WOFF2 latin/cyrillic subsets with font-display: swap.

STEP 04

Deferred integrations

reCAPTCHA waits for submit, chat for interaction or a timer, and GTM for the relevant consent.

STEP 05

Improved accessibility

Contrast, explicit labels, keyboard focus and mobile touch targets — without changing the brand style.

STEP 06

Closed the SEO loop

Canonicals, redirects, metadata, JSON-LD, H1s, internal links, sitemap and live HTTP status.

Performance

Mobile LCP fell by 7.8 seconds in the lab test

The biggest gain did not come from minification. It came from a shorter critical path: a lighter hero, local fonts and later loading of non-essential first-screen services.

Before · mobile

60Performance

FCP4.5 s
LCP9.9 s
TBT60 ms
CLS0
Speed Index6.9 s

After · mobile

96Performance

FCP1.7 s
LCP2.1 s
TBT0 ms
CLS0
Accessibility100

−79%mobile lab LCP

0 msTotal Blocking Time after changes

100Accessibility / Best Practices / SEO

2 / 2Agentic web browsing

Media and the first screen

Images became responsive — not merely compressed

The browser now receives the file that matches the viewport, so a phone no longer downloads a desktop-sized image without a reason.

First-screen hero

mobile −86%

~~445.6 KB JPG~~→60.2 KB WebP

A separate hero-800.webp for mobile and hero-1600.webp for desktop. Dimensions are declared in HTML, keeping CLS at zero.

Header logo

−91%

~~81.2 KB PNG~~→7.1 KB WebP

The compact logo-168.webp remains sharp on retina displays without burdening every page view.

Functionality without the start-up penalty

Analytics, chat and form protection stayed — their loading moment changed

Useful integrations do not have to be removed for a green score. They should start when they are needed and when the visitor has granted the relevant consent.

Core HTML

Content and CTAs are available immediately even while third parties are still idle.

Consent

GTM starts only after analytics or marketing consent.

Intent

reCAPTCHA loads at form submission instead of competing with the hero.

Assistance

Chat activates after interaction or a 15-second idle delay.

Technical SEO and indexing

45 pages in the sitemap — 45 correct live server responses

We verified not only that tags existed in source files, but also what a crawler actually receives in production.

✓

Sitemap health45/45 URLs return HTTP 200, with no dead entries.

✓

Canonical URLsClean URLs align with canonical tags and internal links.

✓

Redirect policywww, index.html and .html variants converge on one canonical URL.

✓

RobotsThe main site is crawlable and the sitemap is declared correctly.

✓

MetadataTitles, descriptions, OG/Twitter, H1 and language signals were checked.

✓

Structured dataJSON-LD is syntactically valid and matches visible page content.

✓

Internal linksKey pages are reachable through standard crawlable links.

✓

UTF-8HTML, XML and HTTP headers serve Ukrainian copy without mojibake.

The live product

Performance work did not erase GRG’s visual language

Graphite, milk, warm gold, large editorial photography and the core CTAs remain recognisable across the homepage and destination pages.

GRG homepage after optimisation — Homepage: the hero, 24/7 CTA and main service pathways.

Germany repatriation page after optimisation — Country landing page: a dedicated Germany → Ukraine route.

Evidence

PageSpeed Insights: saved before-and-after reports

Screenshots were captured from Google PageSpeed Insights. The full reports remain available through the links below.

PageSpeed mobile before optimisation: Performance 60 — **Before · mobile — 60**Report from 20 July 2026, 16:39

PageSpeed mobile after optimisation: Performance 96 — **After · mobile — 96**Report from 20 July 2026, 17:08

PageSpeed desktop before optimisation: Performance 91 — **Before · desktop — 91**Accessibility 88 · Best Practices 92

PageSpeed desktop after optimisation: all categories 100 — **After · desktop — 100 / 100 / 100 / 100**Performance · Accessibility · Best Practices · SEO

45/45URLs respond with 200 OK

Outcome

A faster site for people, a cleaner system for crawlers — with its functionality intact

Mobile Performance rose from 60 to 96 and desktop reached 100. Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO all scored 100. Forms, consent, GTM, reCAPTCHA and chat were retained under a deferred, controlled loading model.

Methodology and claim boundaries

PageSpeed scores are lab measurements and can vary between runs. The mobile field data shown in the same report covers the previous 28 days: LCP 2.3 s, INP 177 ms and CLS 0; Core Web Vitals passed. This case study does not attribute unverified traffic or lead growth to technical changes. Such a claim requires Search Console and analytics data after a sufficient observation window.

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