Case Study: How We Rebuilt Group 87’s Lost Website in Days — and Scored 96, 100, 100

The Client: Group 87 Architectural Hardware

Group 87 Architectural Hardware has served Ontario’s commercial and institutional buildings since 2006. They specify and supply barrier-free entryways, access control, and architectural hardware — the kind of work that quietly keeps hospitals, schools, and office towers running.

Their customers are architects, contractors, and facility managers. These are people who specify products for a living. Before they pick up the phone, they check you out online. A clean, credible website is not a nice-to-have for a business like this — it is a trust signal.

For most of two decades, Group 87 had a website that did that job. Then it stopped.

The Problem: Their Website Broke — and They Lost It

A few months before they came to us, Group 87’s website broke and was lost. Anyone who searched for them — or typed in their address from a business card — landed on a dead “under construction” page.

Think about what that does to an established company. A firm that has been trusted with major buildings since 2006 suddenly looked like it had gone out of business. The single most common way a new architect or contractor would check them out now returned nothing.

This is the quiet cost of a broken website. It is not just a technical problem. Every day it stays down, you lose credibility you spent years building, and you lose leads you will never even know about. There is no bounce report for the prospect who saw a broken page and quietly called a competitor instead.

Group 87 needed to be back online — fast — and they needed it done right this time.

What We Built

Our first job was to stop the bleeding. We rebuilt a faithful replica of the site Group 87 had before — same structure, same content, same recognizable identity — so returning customers and long-time partners found exactly what they expected. No confusing redesign to relearn. Just their site, back where it belonged.

But we did not rebuild the old site’s problems along with it. We rebuilt it on a clean, modern foundation: a static, pre-generated site with no fragile moving parts to break again, served from enterprise-grade hosting on a fast global network.

Then we added the things the old site never had. Proper meta titles and descriptions on every page. A correct heading structure search engines can actually read. Optimized images and lean code so the site loads fast on a phone. A mobile layout that works for a contractor checking specs from a job site.

The result looks like the Group 87 their customers already knew — only faster, cleaner, and built so this never happens again.

The Results: From Offline to Near-Perfect Scores

The honest “before” here is not a low PageSpeed number — it is zero. A broken, lost website does not score. It simply was not there.

Here is where the new site landed on Google’s mobile Lighthouse test:

• ✓Performance: 96 — fast, in Google’s green zone.
• ✓Accessibility: 93 — usable for everyone, including assistive tech.
• ✓Best Practices: 100 — a perfect score on modern web standards.
• ✓SEO: 100 — every technical SEO signal Google checks comes back clean.

These are not vanity numbers. Performance and SEO directly affect how high Group 87 ranks and whether they show up at all. Going from a site that returned nothing to one that scores 96 and two perfect 100s is the difference between being invisible and being found first.

Why This Matters for a Specifier Audience

Group 87’s buyers are professionals who specify products under deadline. They do not have time to wait for a slow page or squint at a layout that breaks on their phone. And they will not stake their own project on a supplier whose website looks neglected.

A fast, clean, technically perfect site does two things at once. It earns trust in the first five seconds — this is a serious company that is still very much in business. And it removes every technical barrier between Group 87 and the top of the search results their customers actually use.

For a trust-heavy B2B business, that first impression is the whole game. Now it works for them instead of against them.

Is Your Website Broken, Slow, or Lost?

Group 87’s situation is more common than you would think. Sites break. Hosting expires. Builders shut down. The person who set it up disappears. For an established business, the result is the same — you look offline to the exact people who were about to call you.

If that is you, the good news is it is fixable, and usually faster than you expect. Not sure where your current site stands? Run a free website audit and get your Google PageSpeed scores and Core Web Vitals in under 60 seconds — no signup required.

And if your site is down, broken, or just not pulling its weight, get started. Answer four quick questions, and if we are a match you will get your GrowToday portal invite within one business day.