← work — the registryENG-013sealed — file open
UK tile retailer
performance rescue — 2.2 s → 47 ms
A family tile business trading online only, on a self-built store: page two for its head terms, seven seconds to paint on a phone, and a duplicate of itself hiding in the sitemap.
- sector
- UK tile retailer · online only
- period
- aug – sep 2026
- role
- engineering pass — hosting, templates, schema, sitemaps, the log
readouts — measured, sourced
04 on the record · every one names its source
2.2 s → 47 ms
server response, before and after
read from — server timing, verified
196
shadow pages taken out of the index and the sitemap
read from — sitemap crawl
7.1 s
mobile largest contentful paint at recon
read from — PageSpeed Insights
113 MB
error log at recon, growing daily
read from — server file listing
the file — read in order
01
the symptom
Head terms on page two while niche style categories ranked in the top four; product pages competing with their own categories.
Largest contentful paint 7.1 s on mobile; server response 2.2 s; an error log at 113 MB and growing daily.
The homepage described itself as an Article by a person; one meta description served site-wide.
02
the finding
No page cache had ever been configured — the server rendered every request from scratch.
196 reusable-block pages were published, indexable and in the sitemap: a shadow site of duplicates the page builder had left public. Cart and checkout were in the sitemap too.
The log flood was three plugins throwing notices with full backtraces on every product call — a few kilobytes each, thousands of times a day.
03
the fix
Blocks hidden from the public and the crawlers, sitemaps and robots rebuilt, per-page metadata, structured data as a local-business entity, the notices silenced at source, caching brought up. Server response 2.2 s → 47 ms.
Two weeks on, the builder's preview broke for editors — the rule hiding the blocks also hid their previews behind a redirect. Fixed with a capability check: editors keep their previews, uncached and noindexed; the public and the crawlers keep seeing nothing. Regression test kept.
provenance
- surfaces touched
- hosting and cache · page-builder templates · sitemaps and robots · structured data · the error log
- numbers read from
- server timing · sitemap crawl · PageSpeed Insights · server file listing
- tags
- performance · duplicate content · schema · woocommerce
identity sealed — the sector is on record; the name publishes only with the client's written approval. every readout above was read at source.
the registry
previous file · ENG-023
Small Business Coach Associates
a false flag traced to the apex host
→
next file · ENG-011
US roofing contractor
growth engineering — ads · lead ops · crm · attribution
→
the same hands
The person who diagnosed this file is the person who ships the fix. Two plain sentences beat a brief.