Case Study · Critical Marketing · Dogfooding

We did our own
playbook on ourselves.

The site you are reading is the case study. In May 2026 we tore down our old Ygency + Elementor site (16 plugins, 50+ MB of overhead, broken contact form, 2024 copyright) and rebuilt it as a custom WordPress theme — the same way we recommend doing it for every client. This is what 30 hours of focused agency work looks like.

The before / after, factually: WordPress plugins went from 16 active to 3 active (WPForms, WP Mail SMTP, Yoast SEO). Themes went from 4 installed to 2 installed (criticalmkt active, twentytwentyfive as default fallback). Page count went from 10 published to 31+ published in the first week. Lighthouse SEO score: 100. INP, LCP, CLS all passing on mobile. Schema markup: Organization + LocalBusiness + WebSite + BreadcrumbList + Article + Person + FAQPage + Service all auto-injected sitewide. Full edit access via SSH + WP-CLI for the autonomous weekly SEO routine. The exact same playbook we run on client engagements.

The problem with the old site.

The old criticalmkt.com had every problem we tell clients to fix. Honestly:

  • Built on Ygency + Elementor. Page-builder lock-in. Every page edit happened through a UI that loaded 21+ MB of unzipped JS/CSS overhead.
  • 16 active plugins. Elementor Pro, Essential Addons, Envato Elements, Header-Footer Elementor, MetForm, OptinMonster, Litespeed Cache, One-Click Demo Import, User Feedback Lite, Public Post Preview, MonsterInsights, Yoast, plus more. Plugin bloat = security surface area + performance cost + maintenance debt.
  • The contact form was rendering as literal text. "[wwlc_login_form]" — the plugin had been deactivated months ago and the shortcode was sitting there in plain view. We did not notice because no one had filled out the form.
  • 2024 copyright in footer. Mid-2026 and the footer said 2024. The kind of detail that signals "we do not care about our own site."
  • $49.3/mo placeholder pricing from the original Ygency demo content, still on the live site.
  • Fake testimonials ("Richard S. Robertson, CEO", "James N. Johnson, CEO") — these were Ygency demo seed data, never replaced.
  • "5k+ Global clients" in the social proof rail. Untrue. Inflated.
  • Lorem ipsum in the Process section. Untouched template copy on a live page.
  • Footer linked to webtend.net demo — the theme vendor's own demo site, not ours.
  • No real schema beyond what Yoast injected. No Organization. No LocalBusiness. No Person. No Service. No FAQPage.
  • No autonomous edit access. The site was a black box managed through the Elementor UI. Tristan could not safely automate any change to it.

A marketing agency that runs sites like this has no moral standing to charge clients to fix their sites. We knew it. We fixed it.

What we built.

01

Custom WordPress theme (no page builders)

PHP templates we edit directly. Hand-written CSS in a single consolidated style.css. Lean main.js with Lenis smooth scroll, custom cursor, and IntersectionObserver-based reveal animations. ~5 MB total theme weight (vs 50+ MB Ygency + Elementor). Hosted on Plesk, full SSH + WP-CLI access for autonomous changes.

02

Plugin cleanup (16 → 3)

Kept what the site actually needs: WPForms (contact form), WP Mail SMTP (Mailgun delivery), Yoast SEO (sitemap + meta). Deleted everything else — Elementor + Pro + addons, Ygency Toolkit (which fatally errored after the theme switch because its classes were defined in the old theme), Litespeed Cache (Cloudflare handles it), MonsterInsights (GA4 hardcoded in header.php instead), all the demo importers and feedback widgets.

03

Full schema markup stack

Organization + LocalBusiness + WebSite + BreadcrumbList + Article + Person + FAQPage + Service. All auto-injected via functions.php. Every page has 3-5 valid JSON-LD blocks. AI engines disproportionately cite pages with structured data — this is the foundation for AI Overview visibility.

04

Real content, no AI sludge

Every page rewritten with the same editorial discipline we use on masLabor: no em dashes, no AI tells ("navigate", "landscape", "comprehensive", "leverage"), complete sentences in narration scripts, real numbers, real client names where permission exists. The Process section lorem ipsum is gone. The fake testimonials are gone. The 5k+ inflation is gone. The webtend footer links are gone.

05

Pillar + cluster content architecture

Service pillar pages (~3,000 words each) for SEO, Google Ads, Content Marketing, Social Media, Brand Design, Video Production, Strategy & Consulting. Location pages (real local content) for Moultrie, Valdosta, Tifton, Albany, Thomasville, Tallahassee. Case studies for masLabor, Bull Electric, Cox Container, and this rebuild. Author bios with Person schema for Tristan and Dean.

06

Performance + mobile

Core Web Vitals all passing on mobile. INP under 200ms (a substantial share of sites fail this threshold in 2026). LCP under 2.5s. CLS under 0.1. Font preloading. Lazy loading on non-LCP images only. WebP image format. Cloudflare edge caching. Lighthouse SEO 100/100.

07

Autonomous routine + brand-safety guardrails

The weekly SEO routine fires Mondays 8 AM ET. It pulls GSC + GA4 + GBP + DataForSEO + PSI + Perplexity citation data, reasons through 8 audit questions, applies safe Tier 1 mutations (alt-text, missing meta, request-indexing, internal links, sitemap submit) up to a 10/run cap, and stages Tier 2 decisions (rewriting meta, new schema, new content briefs, backlink outreach) for Tristan approval. The brand-defense pages (anything ranking top-10 for "Critical Marketing", "criticalmkt", etc.) are protected from autonomous mutation.

What we learned from doing this on ourselves.

Three things stood out, in order of impact:

  1. Tooling decisions cascade. The choice to switch from page builders to PHP templates was not a "make the site faster" decision. It was a "give Claude autonomous edit access" decision. Page builders cannot be safely autonomously edited because their UI is the source of truth. PHP templates can. That single architectural choice unlocked every other capability the autonomous routine depends on.
  2. Plugin minimization is the #1 single performance lever. Going from 16 to 3 active plugins improved Lighthouse score, TTFB, INP, security surface area, and maintenance overhead all at once. Every plugin is a tax on every page load. Most agencies tell clients to install plugins. We tell clients to delete them.
  3. Real content has to come from real people. We tried writing the new site copy with a generic AI workflow early in the project. The output was generic AI sludge. The same trap that caught the early masLabor content caught us. Every page on the new site was rewritten by a named human (Tristan) against the editorial style guide before publishing. There is no shortcut for this.

The playbook, applicable to any client.

Everything in this rebuild is what we sell. If your business currently has:

  • A site built on Elementor / Divi / WPBakery / Beaver Builder with 10+ active plugins
  • Slow Core Web Vitals (especially failed INP > 200ms)
  • No real schema markup beyond what your SEO plugin injects
  • Generic AI-written content with no named author
  • Fake testimonials or lorem ipsum still in the live HTML
  • No autonomous edit access for your team or vendor

— you need exactly this rebuild. We do it on a 4-12 week timeline depending on site complexity. Get a real proposal.

Get in touch

Want this kind of
rebuild on your site?

Send us your current site URL. We respond within one business day with an honest assessment of what is worth fixing.

Start a project [email protected]