Case study · Our own website
How we built UpNrth.
Before we ask anyone to trust us with their website, we built our own the way we'd build theirs. Here's what went into it, and the numbers, which you can check for yourself.
The results
Numbers we're happy to be checked on.
- 100 Lighthouse SEO score
- 100 Lighthouse accessibility score
- 99+ Lighthouse performance score
- <4KB of JavaScript on the whole site
Google Lighthouse lab tests on the homepage, a service page and a blog post, mobile and desktop, run on 22 October 2026. Scores can vary a little from test to test. Run your own test on PageSpeed Insights.
The brief
A new agency, with everything to prove.
UpNrth needed a website that would stand out, load quickly on a patchy rural phone signal, rank in Google, be understood by AI assistants and turn visitors into enquiries.
It also had to practise what we preach. If we're going to tell clients their site should be fast, accessible, secure and measured properly, ours had better be all of those things first.
What we did
Six things done properly.
- 01
Design with personality
We wanted a site that looked like nobody else's and sounded like us: a hand-drawn North Yorkshire fell, a cyclist climbing the rankings, signposts for services and plain, northern straight talking. Every page was designed mobile first, with clear routes to get in touch and accessibility built in from the start.
Web design → - 02
Built light and fast
The site is built with Astro as fast, static pages. There is no database and no PHP running behind it, so whole classes of security problems, like the recent PHP2Shell flaw, simply do not apply. Fonts are self-hosted, styles load with the page and the entire site runs on less than 4KB of JavaScript.
Web development → - 03
SEO from the first page
Every page has a keyword-led title and description, a canonical address and a clear job. There is an automatic XML sitemap, sensible redirects, logical internal linking and around 20 types of structured data, from the business and its services to FAQs, breadcrumbs and articles.
SEO → - 04
Ready for AI search
We publish llms.txt and llms-full.txt files so AI assistants can read a clean summary of who we are and what we do. AI crawlers are welcomed rather than blocked, service pages answer real questions in plain English, and our business details are consistent everywhere they appear.
AI-Powered Search → - 05
Secure and trustworthy
Strict security headers, spam protection on every form (Cloudflare Turnstile plus a hidden trap for bots), an email address that spam bots cannot harvest, and the test address kept out of Google so only the real site gets indexed.
- 06
Measured, with permission
Google Analytics runs through Google Tag Manager, but only after a visitor accepts. Consent Mode v2 is set up properly, "No thanks" really means no tracking, and we measure what matters: successful enquiries and sign-ups, never names or email addresses.
In the spirit of straight talking
Yes, this is our own site.
UpNrth is a new agency and our first client case studies are on the way. We'd rather show you real work we can stand behind than borrow someone else's. Everything on this page is how the site you're reading right now was built, and every score can be checked.
Want results like these for your business? We're currently offering a small number of founding client places.
Want a site like this?
Tell us about your business and your current website, and we'll come back with honest thoughts on what would make the biggest difference.
Book a free consultation hello (at) upnrthdigital.com