VA4REI place trained virtual assistants with real estate investors across the United States. They have been doing it since 2013, and by 2026 their website had stopped keeping up with them.
We rebuilt it. The new site loads in about a second on a phone, scores 99 out of 100 on Google’s mobile performance test, and the team can now update it themselves.
Live site. Scroll and click inside it. Switch between desktop and mobile.
The brief
The original site was built on a popular page builder. That was the right choice at the time, and a year of growth had outgrown it. Pages were heavy, updates meant opening a design tool, and two sections the business needed had never made it onto the site at all.
VA4REI wanted three things: a site that felt as professional as their service, one that loaded quickly for visitors on mobile, and one their own team could keep current without calling a developer.
The approach
We measured the existing site before recommending anything. That is always the first step, and it occasionally ends with me advising a client not to rebuild. Here the numbers were clear: the page was carrying a large amount of weight it did not need, and no amount of tuning would remove most of it.
So we replaced the page builder with a purpose-built design, written by hand for this business. Same host, same domain, same content strategy. The difference is what the browser has to download and how the team works with it day to day.
The design
The direction was trust: a blue and black palette, generous space, and a warm rather than corporate tone. The homepage leads with the actual work an assistant does instead of the usual stock photograph of someone in a headset.
Real client logos and real team photographs run throughout. Where illustration was needed, we built a custom set in the brand’s own colours, drawn to work in both the light and dark versions of the site, since a good share of visitors browse in dark mode.
What we added
- A Careers page, built from the company’s own recruitment story and the words of their existing team.
- A working blog, with a proper article layout, plus a series of researched long-form guides scheduled to publish weekly.
- Full editing control. Services, pricing, team, testimonials and FAQs are all managed from the WordPress dashboard now. No design tool required.
Throughout the rewrite we kept the search phrase the business already ranks for exactly where it was. A redesign that quietly loses a client’s search position is not a success, however good it looks.
The results
Same hosting, same domain. The only thing that changed is the site itself.
Scores from Google PageSpeed Insights, mobile. The homepage now paints its main content in 1.1 seconds and registers zero blocking time, meaning the page responds to a tap the moment it appears.
| Homepage weight | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stylesheet files loaded | 24 | 1 | 96% fewer |
| Script files loaded | 21 | 6 | 71% fewer |
| Page document size | 287 KB | 60 KB | 79% smaller |
How the project ran
Everything was built on a staging copy first and signed off before it reached the live site. The whole build was backed up before launch, and each stage was approved on its own rather than assumed from the last one.
The site was handed over documented and editable. Since launch the client has been publishing to it without me.
