What we found
The site had been built page by page inside Hostinger Website Builder. Every page title, every block of structured data and every address had been typed by hand, so across 106 pages they disagreed with each other in small ways. The builder offered no file access: robots.txt, the XML sitemap and llms.txt were whatever the vendor produced.
It was our own site, so it became the test bed.
What we did
Moved to WordPress in August 2026. Staged the new site, tested it, then pointed the domain at it. Hosting, domain and admin were already in Josh's name; the builder was the only thing that changed.
Published the numbers. Every rate is on a rates page, and both license numbers, the agency's and Josh's, are on the site.
Defined the business once. Name, address, phone and license numbers written once and carried into every page and its Organization schema, so they can never disagree.
Made the site readable to AI. An llms.txt Josh controls, a robots file that admits the AI crawlers and an XML sitemap.
Hardened the contact form. After a bot defeated the invisible reCAPTCHA on August 28, 2026, the form went to a checkbox challenge plus a honeypot the same day.
Cleaned up Search Console in September 2026. The www and bare-domain versions of the site were consolidated onto one address. Retired addresses that Google still served were re-requested for crawl one at a time. FAQ markup came off ten pages. A statute date that was wrong on three pages was corrected.
What the owner holds
Everything, because the owner is Josh: the domain, the hosting, the WordPress admin, Search Console, Analytics and the Business Profile.
What the numbers say
Average position in Google search moved from 22.4 to 18.4. That compares the 28 days before the September 17 cleanup (August 20 to September 16, 2026) with October 11 to November 7, 2026, read in Search Console's web results on November 9. Clicks and impressions held about level: 74 clicks on 8,054 impressions before, 78 clicks on 7,934 impressions after. Impressions in Google's AI features went from 815 to 777.
The earlier window still carries some of the August move, so read the position change as the move settling and the cleanup together, not the cleanup alone.
Gross revenue, from Josh's books: about $12,000 a month on average before the August move, then about $30,000 in August, $27,000 in September and $28,000 in October 2026. Search clicks held about level over the same stretch, so Search Console does not explain the rise, and we do not claim the website caused all of it. These are one firm's months, not a forecast for yours.
What we would tell another owner on a builder
If you cannot edit your robots file or see your own sitemap, the vendor owns the part of your site that search engines and AI read. The GEO Audit checks both in an afternoon.
The other case study, Anderson Dock & Lift, is a client's site leaving a managed vendor. Josh Goldberg and Patrick Colton did the work on both.