Elevating Family-Owned Furniture Store's Online Presence

I’m excited to share a recent project I had the pleasure of working on: developing a one-page, SEO-optimized website for Hower Furniture. The goal was to enhance their online presence and attract more visitors to their store in Los Angeles.

Challenge

The project required a quick turnaround and a design that balanced simplicity with functionality. Focused on speed and SEO, I developed a functional and user-friendly website in just a few hours, aiming to rank at the top for keywords such as “outlet furniture store Los Angeles” and “home decor store Los Angeles”.

Design and Execution

without the need for database queries or a backend system, I opted for the Hugo static website generator. My familiarity with Hugo and its simplicity made it the perfect choice for this project. The development process, involving hand-coded HTML and SCSS, took only a few hours, allowing more time for SEO optimization and performance improvements. I deployed the site on Netlify using GitHub CI/CD pipelines, which went smoothly.

After the launch, I made several adjustments to content and code to enhance SEO and performance. Considering the website was just one page, I knew quality content was crucial. For the SEO part, I updated the title, meta description, H1 tags, content, and added structured data markup (schema). Initial performance checks with Google’s Pagespeed Insights revealed a score around 70, affected mostly by third-party sources - an Instagram feed widget and Google Fonts. Removing the Instagram widget and optimizing font usage improved the score, but not as much as anticipated. Surprisingly, a block of text using the system font was causing a delay in the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). The solution? Splitting the above-the-fold copy into two paragraphs, which dramatically increased the score to approximately 99 for both mobile and desktop.

Tangible Outcomes

Within just 6 days post-launch, we began to see promising results. Increased traffic and positive feedback have set us on a successful trajectory. Most importantly, we’re achieving our primary goal: securing top positions on Google for our key search terms, significantly boosting potential in-store visits.

This project exemplifies the impact of targeted digital strategies on the online presence of family-owned businesses. I’m proud of the achievements for Hower Furniture and am excited to continue monitoring and enhancing its online traffic to attract more customers to the store.