One Man One Stump case study

CASE STUDY 04

ONE MAN
ONE STUMP

Client: One Man One Stump
Trade: Stump & root grinding
Patch: Herts, Beds, Bucks & North London
Scope: Design ◦ copy ◦ build
Year: 2026

THE PROBLEM

One man, four grinders and a name that does half the marketing on its own. Andrew grinds out tree stumps across five counties, and his Wix site had grown to twenty six pages: fifteen of them near-identical town pages, one of them an empty booking page telling visitors there was "nothing to book right now".

The homepage took 7.2 seconds to show anything at all, hauling 1.6 megabytes through 111 requests and 74 scripts. When it finally arrived, the headline was white text laid straight over a busy photo. Hard to read on a desktop, worse on a phone, and all of it rented for a platform fee every year.

The old One Man One Stump website: white headline text laid over a busy photo of a stump grinder, hard to read

The new One Man One Stump website: bone and bark palette, a clear headline reading One man. One mission. No stump left standing, with call buttons and trust badges

First paint: 7.2s ▸ 0.4seighteen times faster before a visitor sees a single word
Requests to load the homepage: 111 ▸ 161.6 megabytes and 74 scripts became a quarter of the weight
Pages: 26 ▸ 4fifteen copy-paste town pages became one honest areas page, every old URL redirected

WHAT WE DID

The best thing about this business is the bloke running it, so the rebuild leads with him. His tree-stump logo set the palette, bone, bark and moss, with a tree-ring motif running through the details. And the copy sounds like Andrew, because a man who names a grinder The Terminator shouldn't sound like a brochure.

A headline you can actually read. "One man. One mission. No stump left standing." on a proper dark tint, instead of white text dissolving into a photo.
Twenty six pages became four. Fifteen separate town pages is an old SEO tactic that Google stopped rewarding years ago. One genuine areas page does the job better, and all twenty six old URLs redirect to the right place so his Google history survives.
The dead booking page, gone. No forms, no booking widget, nothing that can sit empty. Just call, text or email, one tap each.
Trust signals in the first screen. NPTC qualified, £5m public liability insurance, registered waste carrier. On the old site you had to go digging.
The machines get top billing. Four grinders from briefcase-sized to a 40hp beast on tracks, each written up like the characters they are.
A call bar that follows you. On a phone, his number stays pinned to the bottom of every page. A stump job is a phone call, not a checkout.

Services section of the new One Man One Stump site: stump grinding, root removal, waste removal and planting as photo cards — Four jobs on the page, in plain English

Machines section of the new One Man One Stump site, headlined: Four grinders. One of them is called The Terminator. — Four jobs on the page, in plain English

Old One Man One Stump site on a phone: off-centre layout with detached email and phone buttons

New One Man One Stump site on a phone: centred hero with a sticky call bar pinned to the bottom

THE RESULT

From 7.2 seconds of blank screen to a site that paints in under half a second and gets to the point just as fast: who he is, what he grinds, how to call him.

Four pages, no platform, no plugins and no yearly platform bill. Built once, owned outright, with enough personality that you can hear him saying it.

See the live build ▸