Hillcrest Property Services

Hillcrest Property Services is a family-owned lawn care and property maintenance company serving Agawam and the lower Pioneer Valley. Actium rebuilt its Squarespace site as a fast static site.

The problem

The site ran on Squarespace, and its homepage weighed 5.3 MB across 84 requests. Nearly 1 MB of that was JavaScript the page never used. Display headings wrapped mid-word, and the live gallery was still filled with the template’s demo placeholder images, indexed under the business’s own domain.

What was built

Actium rebuilt every page to match the old site’s layout and content: each service page, the owner’s family story, and the full service-area list. The rebuild also adds a serif and sans-serif type pairing, cards of one size, and local-SEO structured data on every page.

It fixed two content errors on the old site, too. One was an FAQ that had drifted a full position out of alignment, so three answers sat under the wrong questions. The other was the gallery of demo placeholders.

Outcome

	Before	After
Homepage, every request	5.29 MB	1.00 MB
Requests	84	15
HTML document	37 KB	17 KB
JavaScript	1.08 MB	none
Hosting	$192/year	$0

Squarespace5.3 MB

Rebuild1.0 MB

Both bars share one scale. The first weighs 5 times as much as the second. Each bar is the whole homepage on a phone, with all its requests, measured 17 Aug 2026.

Most of what remains is photography, which is the point of a page selling property work. The service card images were the single biggest saving. Several were 900 by 1200 portrait files, rendered into a thumbnail a fifth that size. The browser downloaded the whole file and threw most of it away.

Where it stands

Live on the company’s own domain since September 2026. The old Squarespace site stays up, set to private, as a fallback until its paid term ends. The domain’s email moved across with the DNS, and the owner confirmed it worked the same evening.