You are looking at the example
Rather than describe work you cannot see, here is a project you are using right now. Everything below is checkable from where you are sitting.
Client work stays private. This one is mine, so I can show all of it.
What it is
A static site. The pages are plain text files in a git repository, built into HTML and served from object storage behind a CDN. There is no page builder, no plugin layer, no monthly platform fee, and no account that can be closed with the site inside it.
That matters more than it sounds. The common starting position for a small business is a site on a hosted platform, where the content lives inside somebody else's product. It works until you want to leave, and at that point the content is the thing you cannot easily take with you.
What it costs to run
- Hosting. Object storage and a CDN, billed on usage. At this traffic level, a few dollars a month.
- Domain. The usual annual registration.
- Forms. A hosted form endpoint, free at low volume.
- Platform fee. None. There is nothing to subscribe to.
Against a typical hosted website plan the monthly difference is real but not dramatic. The difference that actually matters is ownership rather than price.
Numbers you can check yourself, right now
Chrome has Lighthouse built into its developer tools. Run it against this page. On a production build, at the time of writing:
- Performance 97
- Accessibility 100
- SEO 100
- First contentful paint 1.2s, on a throttled mobile connection
I am giving you the method rather than asking you to take the numbers on trust. Run the same check against your current site while you are at it. If it scores worse, that is worth knowing whether or not you ever hire me.
What is deliberately unfinished
Best Practices scores lower than the rest, because the site loads analytics and analytics sets cookies. That is a trade rather than an oversight: knowing whether anything works is worth more to me right now than a perfect score.
There are five blog posts. There used to be eighty. They were produced quickly, they all followed the same shape, and between them they earned almost no readers, so most were retired and redirected rather than left up to pad a number. Count them yourself on the blog page; if that number and this sentence ever disagree, believe the page.
There is no client case study anywhere on this site, because no client engagement has been delivered yet. When one is, it appears here with permission, or it does not appear at all.
What that means for your site
If you are on a hosted platform and want off it, this is roughly what the destination looks like. Your content in files you own. Hosting that costs less than the platform did. A blog you can actually post to. Forms that reach you with the source attached, so you know which enquiry came from where. Analytics that records visitors rather than your own browsing.
The migration is the work. The content has to come across, the old URLs have to keep redirecting so you do not lose whatever search traffic you already have, and somebody has to confirm the forms genuinely deliver rather than assuming it. None of that is glamorous, and all of it is where these projects go wrong.