Do Papel para o Mundo: a restoration atelier site delivered 13 days early, at 156 KB and with no page builder

The business is handmade and visual: restoring and rebinding bibles and treasured books, piece by piece. So the product of the site is not text — it is the difference between how the object arrived and how it left. Everything else in the build serves that.

Custom theme, zero page builder

The site is a WordPress theme written from scratch, with no Elementor and no visual builder. The consequence is direct and measurable: the home page loads 156 KB and responds in roughly 0.2 seconds. An equivalent site assembled in a page builder usually ships the same page at many times that weight, because it loads the builder’s engine on every visit, forever.

The choice has a real cost worth stating: changing the structure requires someone who writes code. In exchange, the client edits all content from a Portuguese-language admin panel with her own administrator account, and received a self-contained manual in a single file that opens offline and prints to PDF from the browser.

47 MB of photos become 1.1 MB

The client sent 24 PNG photos totalling 47 MB. Published as they arrived, they would be the very definition of a slow site. After processing, the same 24 images total 1.1 MB — and each one got its own alt text, written one by one, not batch-generated from the file name.

The gallery became a carousel of three at a time, with click to enlarge. The client asked for that in the second review round.

Before and after, and a limitation left on the record

The four before-and-after pairs use a drag curtain: the visitor pulls the divider and sees the same piece in both states. It is the feature that sells this kind of work best.

But the effect is only perfect when both photos share the same framing, and the originals do not — they were taken at different moments, without that concern. This was told to the client in plain words, as a recommendation to reshoot two or three pairs from the same position. Shipping the feature and hiding the limitation would have been more comfortable and less honest.

Three videos, no YouTube

The opening plays video on loop, with no interface and no third-party logo on top. YouTube autoplay was actually tested and discarded for a specific reason: the embed draws the title and channel name over the image, and no URL parameter removes it.

The three videos became self-hosted files, served from the site’s own server. The atelier appears without another company’s frame around it.

A FAQ that exists in the HTML

The six FAQ questions use HTML’s own native accordion element, with the text present on the page from the first byte, plus FAQPage structured data. The difference matters: an accordion that only exists after JavaScript runs is an accordion the search engine may never read.

Speed is not a number in a report. It is the difference between the photo of the work opening or not opening on the phone of someone deciding whether to hire you.

A client decision the site respected

In the second round she asked for the street address to be removed from the entire site, for personal safety. It was removed from every page, and the footer map became a link — never an embedded frame, which would load third-party tracking on every visit.

The search results are wide open

Market research done before the design showed something rare: the search for "bible restoration" in Portuguese is practically empty. Of the few results, only two are real businesses, both with domain authority of 1 and 3. No regional variation is taken. A technically sound site publishing consistently has a clear path — and that was recorded as an opportunity, not sold as a promise.

Deadline

Contracted for 21 August. Approved by the client with two review rounds applied, and indexing released on 8 August 2026 — thirteen days early.