A legacy site rebuilt for speed, and completed bookings jumped 118%.

The situation

Align Chiro Care is a busy chiropractic practice with a strong local reputation and a steady flow of referrals. On paper, demand wasn't the problem. The problem was that their digital presence, built years earlier on a dated template and a chain of plugins, was actively getting in the way of the people trying to become patients.

Two-thirds of the clinic's traffic came from mobile, and the mobile experience was where everything fell apart. The homepage took more than six seconds to become usable on a phone. Layouts broke on smaller screens. And the online booking flow, the single most important action on the entire site, ran to five screens of stop-and-start form fields that lost people at every step.

The result was a quiet, expensive leak. The clinic was paying to bring visitors in through local search and ads, and then watching most of them drop off before they ever reached a confirmed appointment. Nobody could see the leak, because it was happening on the part of the funnel that never generated a phone call.

The audit

We started by measuring what was actually happening rather than guessing. A week of performance profiling, session analysis, and funnel tracking surfaced the real culprits:

• Performance: a 6.4s mobile time-to-interactive and a Lighthouse mobile score of 34, render-blocking scripts, unoptimised images, and layout shift on nearly every page.
• Responsiveness: core pages built for desktop widths, with tap targets, menus, and the booking form breaking or overlapping on common phone sizes.
• Booking friction: a five-step booking flow with redundant fields, no progress indication, and a 61% mobile bounce before completion.
• Accessibility: insufficient colour contrast, missing labels, and no keyboard path through the booking form.
• Content pathways: the most common patient questions, insurance, first-visit expectations, location and hours, were buried, forcing people back to search or the phone.

Before and after

What we built

1. A design system, straight from Figma

We designed fully responsive interfaces in Figma first, every page and component specified at mobile, tablet, and desktop widths before a line of production code was written. This gave the clinic a chance to react to the real thing early, and gave our engineers a single source of truth. Modern UX/UI principles and WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards were baked into the components rather than bolted on at the end.

2. A rebuilt front end on React and Tailwind

We rebuilt the site on React.js with Tailwind CSS, replacing the old template-and-plugin stack with a lean, component-driven architecture. Images were converted to modern formats and lazy-loaded, scripts were code-split, and render-blocking assets were eliminated. Mobile time-to-interactive dropped from 6.4 seconds to 1.2, and the Lighthouse mobile score went from 34 to 98.

3. Motion that adds engagement, not weight

Rather than treat animation as decoration, we used it to guide attention, subtle scroll-reveal on key sections, micro-interactions on the booking steps, and smooth transitions that make the site feel responsive and alive. Every animation was implemented with GPU-friendly CSS transforms so it enhanced visual engagement without costing load speed, the entire motion layer adds no measurable time to first interaction.

4. A booking funnel with the friction removed

We rebuilt the booking journey around a single question: what does the patient actually need to give us to hold an appointment? Five screens became two. Redundant fields were cut, a clear progress indicator was added, and the flow was made fully keyboard- and screen-reader accessible. The most common pre-booking questions, insurance, what to expect on a first visit, hours and location, were surfaced directly in the flow so nobody had to leave to find an answer.

The build timeline

The tech stack

Results at 3 months

• Mobile load time: 1.2 seconds (down from 6.4s), an 81% reduction
• Lighthouse mobile score: 98 (up from 34)
• Mobile bounce rate: 29% (down from 61%), more than halved
• Completed online bookings: +118% from the same traffic
• Booking flow: 5 steps → 2 steps, fully accessible
• Accessibility: WCAG 2.1 AA across all page templates

The clinic didn't spend a dollar more on acquisition to get these results. The same visitors simply stopped leaking out of a broken funnel, and the website went from a liability to the practice's most dependable source of new patients.