Project
NW Salmon Smokehouse
Family-owned cafe and artisan market, Chehalis WA
Refresh of a live site. August to September 2026.
Where it started
The food deserved a better site.
The Smokehouse already ranked first for smoked salmon in Chehalis, through its menu page. The site around that ranking was thin: most pages had no main heading, descriptions were automatic, ten leftover demo products pointed at a store that did not exist, and the phone number was not tappable everywhere.
Frank and Danielle wanted a site that looked like the awards on their wall and the food on their plates, without losing the ranking that brings people in.
What went into it
The work, item by item.
A gated staging copy with a private link the owners could open on their phones, and a full baseline of rankings and pages captured first.
A switch to SEOPress with every existing title carried over word for word, plus restaurant structured data with hours and rating.
A new editorial design system, and every page rebuilt in it, with a new Press page and the first original blog post.
Sixty-nine Facebook reels reviewed, the best re-encoded and hosted on the site as native video, so nothing depends on a social network.
A hundred and thirty professional photos received and placed site-wide, keyed so any one can be swapped in a single step.
A scripted launch with a tested rollback, old sitemap addresses redirected, and the site submitted to Google.
Hardening after launch, weekly file backups, and analytics moved into the SEO plugin so one less plugin runs.
A performance pass: two thousand images converted to WebP, the hero preloaded, caching tuned, and a gentle hero crossfade that respects reduced-motion settings.
The result
Cleaner, faster, still first.
Zero accessibility violations on every live page the day after launch, and every title matched the old site at cutover.
Mobile page speed on the homepage went from 73 to 87, with the main image loading in half the time.
The sitemap was ingested by Google with no errors. The ranking comparison is due in late September.
Runs on: Native Kadence with a child theme, SEOPress, restaurant structured data, LiteSpeed caching, self-hosted video.
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