Case study · Our own site · Audit and fix pass

A 7,474-page site, audited and fixed in one pass.

RedWhiteJesus.com is our faith content and church directory site. It had grown from a few dozen pages into a full Bible, a nationwide church directory and a dozen reference sections. We audited all of it, then shipped the critical fixes the same day.

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One of our own websites. Every number below comes from our own audit and build records.

RedWhiteJesus.com homepage on a laptop, a site we built and run
RedWhiteJesus.com on a phone
7,474
Pages auditedCritical fixes shipped the same day
redwhitejesus.com · one of our own sites · captured live Oct 9, 2026
7,474

pages in the build, audited end to end

5,923

pages given correct canonical and social URLs

670 KB142 KB

shared church-directory banner image

3

critical findings, all fixed and live the same day

From our audit of the live site: security, crawl, structured data, performance, Search Console and a real-browser pass at phone and desktop widths.

Our sitePublishingTechnical audit and fix pass
The situation

The site outgrew its original plan.

A homepage rendering error fired on every load. It left the stat counters showing zero and a large blank gap below the hero until a visitor scrolled, which is exactly what screenshot bots and fast scrollers saw.

Most of the main menu only existed after a hover or a tap, so it added zero links to the raw HTML that crawlers read. Three pages had no other way in. Thousands of directory pages pointed their canonical tag at the wrong URL, and one 670 KB banner slowed the whole church directory.

RedWhiteJesus.com homepage, before scrollingOur own site
Homepage after the fix, captured without scrolling: the church finder, the By the Numbers stats and the next sections all render immediately.
Homepage before the fix, captured without scrolling: a large blank area below the verse of the day where the church finder and stats should be.
Before: before the fix, no scroll, Oct 8, 2026After: after the fix, no scroll, Oct 8, 2026Both captured at 1440px wide without scrolling, cropped below the hero.
What we did

A 7,474-page site audited end to end and fixed in one pass.

The three critical findings, plus the live-email and form-security issues, were fixed and shipped the same day as the audit.

01 · The homepage

Stats that show on first load.

The fix: the verse of the day is now picked on the server, so the server and the browser render the same page and the error no longer fires. The counters are correct in the first HTML, and the blank gap is gone.

  • Rendering error on every homepage load: fixed
  • Stat counters correct without JavaScript or scrolling
  • No blank gap for bots, previews or fast scrollers
Critical findingsReal findings
  • CRITHomepage stat counters showed wrong valuesFixed
  • CRITRendering error fired on every homepage loadFixed
  • CRITMain menu contributed zero crawlable linksFixed
  • HIGHNewsletter welcome email still promoted a store that no longer existedFixed
  • HIGHForm spam checks could be skipped by scriptsFixed
Worded for this page. All five were fixed and shipped the same day as the audit.
02 · Navigation

A menu crawlers can actually read.

The desktop dropdowns and the mobile menu were only added to the page after someone hovered or tapped. Now every menu link is in the HTML from the start, so the full navigation is visible to anything that reads the page, and the three orphaned pages are connected again.

The main menu in the raw HTMLSimplified
Before links appear only after a hover
<nav> Bible, Daily Verse, Prayers (dropdown links missing)</nav>
After every link in the HTML
<nav> Bible Quiz, Holiday Guide Books the Bible Left Out ...</nav>
Simplified. The three pages shown in green had no other link pointing to them before the fix.
03 · The directory

5,923 pages pointed at themselves.

We set self-referencing canonical and social URLs on 5,861 church pages and 62 other pages, so search engines and social networks credit each page to its own URL. The shared directory banner went from 670 KB to 142 KB as WebP, and church entries in the sitemap now carry last-modified dates.

  • Canonical and social URLs fixed on 5,923 pages
  • Directory banner: 670 KB to 142 KB
  • Duplicate breadcrumb data removed from the Bible section

Shared church-directory banner

One image loaded across the whole directory
Before670 KB
670 KB
After142 KB
142 KB
04 · Cleanup

No leftover store, no collected names.

The store was retired months earlier, but a welcome email still promised a discount and linked to a shop that no longer existed. We removed the newsletter and the leftover store code, tightened form spam checks with rate limits, and added analytics with Google signals and ad personalization turned off.

What changed for a visitorIllustration
Signs up on the busiest pageBefore: got a coupon for a store that was gone.Removed
Sends a contact messageNow rate-limited, spam-checked and escaped before it reaches the inbox.Hardened
Browses the siteAnalytics on, with ad personalization off and Global Privacy Control honored.Private
Diagram of the changes, not a dashboard capture.
Process

How the work actually ran.

The same order every time: measure, rank, fix, then measure again and report the result either way.

  1. 01

    Audit

    Security, crawl and structured data, performance, Search Console and a real-browser pass, each checked separately.

    Scope
    Pages7,474
    GradeB-
  2. 02

    Rank

    Three critical findings first, then high, medium and low.

    Critical
    Findings3
  3. 03

    Fix

    Rendering, navigation, canonicals, images, forms and leftover store code.

    Canonicals fixed
    Pages5,923
  4. 04

    Ship and verify

    Live the same day, re-checked in a real browser before and after scrolling.

    Banner
    Weight670 to 142 KB
The honest part

What we have not measured yet.

Before the fix, the church directory pages scored 81 on mobile Lighthouse with a 5.2 second LCP. The banner is now 142 KB, but we have not published an after score for those pages yet, so we do not claim one.

Search traffic on this site fell in September after a spike, and our investigation pointed to a new-site spike settling down rather than lost positions. This fix pass was technical. We are not claiming a traffic result from it, and a few smaller items, like missing preview images on about 40 pages, are still open.

Services used

The work on this project maps to these services.

Questions

Case study FAQ

How big was the RedWhiteJesus.com audit?

The build generates 7,474 pages, including a full Bible, a nationwide church directory of about 5,900 pages and a dozen reference sections. The audit covered security, crawl and structured data, performance, Search Console and a real-browser pass.

What were the critical findings?

A rendering error on every homepage load, homepage stat counters showing wrong values, and a main menu that added zero links to the HTML crawlers read. All three were fixed and live the same day.

Why does a hover-only menu matter for SEO?

Crawlers read the page's HTML. If menu links are only added after a hover or tap, crawlers may never see them, and pages that are only linked from the menu can end up orphaned. Three pages on this site had no other path in.

Did the fixes increase traffic?

We do not claim that. This was a technical pass. Traffic had dipped after a spike in September, and our investigation pointed to normal settling rather than lost rankings.

Can you audit a large site like this?

Yes. Large programmatic sites are where crawl and template problems multiply. Start with the free live audit and we will show you what we see.

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