Tradectory
Prepared for Bailey, CEO
Website review · 31 October 2026 · Splitlight

tradectory.com · Technical and SEO review

Your results are strong.
Your website is hiding them.

We crawled the 57 pages of tradectory.com, checked every URL against the live site and ran Google Lighthouse on mobile. The case studies and articles are genuinely good. The build underneath them is pointing Google at pages that don't exist, leaving most of the site off Google's map, and asking phones to download 29 MB for the homepage and up to 86 MB for a service page. These faults live in the templates and the CMS rather than in individual pages, which is why we recommend moving the site rather than patching it.

39/49

canonical tags point Google at a page that returns 404. Your SEO service page points to /test-title.

50/57

live pages are missing from the sitemap. It was last updated in January 2023.

29MB

to load the homepage on a phone. The SEO service page is 68 MB. A typical web page is 2 to 3 MB.

0/57

pages carry structured data, so nothing on the site qualifies for rich results in Google.

Measured, not guessed

How the site performs on a phone

Google Lighthouse, mobile simulation, run on 31 October 2026. Google uses these same speed signals (Core Web Vitals) in ranking.

PageSpeed scoreMain content visibleDownload
Homepage713.7 s29 MB
Construction SEO service5111.3 s68 MB
Case study: 7-figure revenue783.4 s40 MB
After the move90+under 2.5 sunder 2 MB
92 to 100

That's the SEO score Lighthouse gives these same pages. It only checks that the right tags exist, not whether they lead anywhere real.

That's how the problems below have stayed invisible: the automated checks pass while Google is being sent to dead pages.

What we found

Four problems, all built into the site

Each one on its own would cost rankings. Together they mean Google sees a fraction of the site, through the wrong URLs, slowly.

01Indexing

Google is being pointed at dead pages

  • Every page tells Google which URL is the official version (the canonical tag). 39 of the 49 URLs it names return a 404.
  • Many are leftover CMS placeholders: the SEO service page points to /test-title, four articles to numbered copies of /insights-article-title-goes-here, one to /f.
  • All six insight categories claim to be the same page, as do all three case-study categories.
  • The 10 that do work name the wrong host (www.), so each goes through two redirects.

Why it mattersWhen the canonical is broken, Google ignores it and guesses. You lose control of which page ranks, and ranking strength gets split between versions.

02Crawling

Google can't find most of the site

  • The sitemap lists 14 URLs, last updated 18 January 2023. Seven of them now redirect. None of the 22 articles or 4 case studies are in it.
  • robots.txt sends Google to a sitemap on the wrong host.
  • 22 article links on the insight category pages go to /insights/insights/…, which returns a 404.
  • Menu and footer links skip the trailing slash, so nearly every click is a redirect. Some old service URLs take three hops to land.

Why it mattersNew articles rely on Google stumbling across them, and its crawl time is spent on redirects and dead ends instead of your content.

03Speed

Pages are far too heavy for a phone on site

  • 12 GIFs totalling 155 MB stand in for video. The three case-study covers weigh 42 to 67 MB as a set; as MP4 they're 12 MB.
  • One homepage photo is 13.7 MB. About Us loads 58 MB, mostly PNGs.
  • Only 3 images on the whole site load lazily. None use modern formats (WebP, AVIF) or sizes matched to the screen.
  • The VWO testing script hides the whole page for up to 2 seconds while it loads, and the CMS login widget loads on every public page.

Why it mattersYour buyers are on site, on 4G. At 10 Mbps the SEO service page is close to a minute of downloading, and Google counts speed in rankings.

04On-page

The basics are broken page by page

  • 19 pages have several main headings (H1s), up to 13 on one page. The homepage has 10. Each page should have one.
  • 9 pages have no title, 12 have no description, and the Centaur case study's description reads test.
  • Placeholder pages are live and indexable: Digital eXperience Design (22 words) and Website Design (140 words, titled "Web Design Agency London").
  • All 57 pages share one social share image, a file named logo-test-2, linked in a format LinkedIn and Facebook can't rely on. The footer still says © 2024.

Why it mattersTitles, headings and share previews are what people see before they click, in Google and on LinkedIn.

The proposal

Move it to Splitlight CMS. Keep every word.

Your content stays exactly as it is. We move it to Splitlight CMS and fix everything underneath it.

Why move rather than patch

  1. The faults are in the templates. The canonical field, heading levels, image handling and GIF "video" are baked into shared components, so every page inherits them.
  2. The site runs two generations of templates. Three service pages still use an older service_old layout.
  3. The CMS is out of support. It's Netlify CMS 2.x, loaded from a public CDN. The project became Decap CMS in 2023 and this version no longer gets updates.
  4. Nothing needs rewriting. The copy, case studies and articles move across as they are. Only what's underneath changes.
  5. Prospects will check. You sell SEO and web design. A service page that points Google at /test-title is the first thing their audit tool flags.

Every issue on this page, fixed

  • Correct canonicals. Every page names its own URL on one host. The 39 dead ones and placeholders like /test-title are gone.
  • A complete sitemap that updates itself, a working robots.txt, and both submitted to Google.
  • No broken links or chains. The 22 dead article links fixed, every old URL redirected in one hop, menu links straight to the page.
  • Pages under 2 MB. GIFs become MP4, images become WebP or AVIF at the right size and load lazily. Target: 90+ mobile speed score.
  • Nothing hiding the page. VWO no longer blanks the screen, and the CMS login widget stays off public pages.
  • One H1, a real title and a description on every page, including the 9 that have none.
  • Structured data for the company, services, case studies and articles.
  • Proper share previews on LinkedIn, WhatsApp and Facebook, with the right image for each page.
  • Placeholder pages kept out of Google until they're written.

Move tradectory.com to Splitlight CMS, content unchanged, with every issue on this page fixed.

Project
£2,500 + VAT
Hosting
£50 / month all in
Timeline
5 days once assets and content are agreed

A retainer package can be added on top if you need ongoing support.