The Challenge
A specialist B2B professional services firm with three UK offices had a website that looked clean on the surface but carried serious technical debt beneath it. A third-party plugin had been secretly injecting 307 hidden links and keyword-stuffing modules across every page, damaging trust with search engines and inflating crawl costs. Year-on-year, organic visibility was falling: 23 keywords had slipped out of positions two and three despite the site receiving more impressions than ever. The site was also failing Google’s Core Web Vitals assessment, and a persistent rendering bug was preventing mobile users from seeing the homepage at all.
- A malicious plugin injecting 307 hidden links and keyword-stuffing modules across every page
- Core Web Vitals failing on mobile, with the homepage not rendering for real users
- Site health rated in the bottom 60% of audited websites
- 27 broken links, 11 redirect chains and over 9,000 stale database entries
- Accessibility score of 71/100 with template-level issues across multiple components
Our Approach
1. Technical Audit
A nine-area diagnostic covering SEO, technical health, performance, accessibility and UX, drawing from Google Search Console, GA4, PageSpeed Insights and direct code inspection, to produce a ranked action list with time estimates.
2. Malware and Plugin Remediation
Immediate removal of the plugin injecting hidden links sitewide, followed by a full audit of all remaining plugins against active usage to eliminate dead weight and reduce page load.
3. Performance Engineering
Root-cause investigation and fix for two separate bugs blocking mobile users: an HTML cache truncation issue and a lazy-load script hijacking the DOMContentLoaded event, preventing the page from rendering entirely.
4. Technical SEO and Schema
Service schema deployed across all service pages, LocalBusiness schema added for all three offices, security headers and cache rules shipped via .htaccess and over 9,000 stale database entries cleared.
How I Work
Discovery and Audit
A nine-area diagnostic drawing from Search Console, GA4, PageSpeed Insights and direct inspection, producing a prioritised action list with effort estimates across technical, accessibility, content and off-site work.
Structured Delivery
Work delivered in focused sprint cycles against a shared action document, with every completed item signed off and new findings captured for the next phase. Full transparency throughout.
Measure and Report
Progress tracked via SERanking, Search Console and PageSpeed Insights at the close of each sprint, with a written report mapping every outcome back to the original audit line by line.
The Results
In a single seven-day delivery window, the site’s health score moved from Decent (top 42% of audited sites) to Strong (top 12%). Core Web Vitals moved from FAILED to PASSED, with Cumulative Layout Shift improving from 0.13 to 0.10. Every broken link was resolved, redirect chains were cleared and the persistent mobile rendering bug that had been blocking visitors from seeing the homepage was fully fixed. Within a week of the changes going live, the site recorded 3 conversions from organic search, compared to none in the months before.