A fictional business. The figures are a modelled scenario, not a client result.
Dunavski Bryag Trust — River conservation NGO · Ruse
Crawl errors down 96%
Gauge read 1,948 at survey, 78 at month 6. Watch the water fall →
A decade of plugins left the site slow, half-broken and full of 404s, and grant funders couldn't find their research reports.
§1The challenge
A decade of plugins left the site slow, half-broken and full of 404s, and grant funders couldn't find their research reports.
The Trust monitors 80 km of the Bulgarian Danube bank around Ruse: water quality, sturgeon spawning, island restoration. Its funding depends on research reports that grant officers in Sofia, Vienna and Brussels need to find, cite and download. Over ten years and three redesigns-by-plugin, those reports sank out of sight.
Every broken URL was a dead end for a crawler and a funder alike. The brief was not a facelift: it was to rebuild from the riverbed up, and to prove the water was falling with a measurement that anyone on the board could read.
Composition of the flood · M0
§2Diagnosis · field notes
A full crawl, 90 days of server logs, Search Console coverage and Chrome UX Report field data, logged like a river survey: station, instrument, reading.
1,948 errors
Search Console coverage and a full crawl agreed: almost two thousand URLs that Google tried and failed to fetch, wasting most of a small site's crawl budget.
63 orphaned
Every grant and field report lived as a bare PDF in /uploads/, which robots.txt blocked. No landing pages, titles or authors: funders searching a report's name found nothing.
LCP 6.3 s
38 active plugins shipped 2.7 MB of JavaScript to every page. A five-image hero slider painted last; mobile LCP at p75 failed by more than double.
0 entities
No NGO or Organization markup, broken Event markup on clean-up days, and no Report or Dataset types for the research the Trust exists to publish.
212 duplicates
Bulgarian and English versions of the same page competed against each other with no hreflang and inconsistent canonicals.
41% abandon
The three-step volunteer form, itself a plugin, failed silently on iOS Safari; sign-ups depended on people who emailed instead.
§3The strategy
Built on our Signal plan (technical seo), with four tactics in sequence.
Dredge the riverbed: replace a decade of plugins with a lean, static theme the Trust's two staff can maintain.
Make the site fast on a volunteer's phone on a riverbank, measured in field data, not lab scores.
Stop the inflow, then drain: fix the causes of broken URLs before fixing the URLs themselves.
Label the channel so search engines understand an NGO, its events and its research for what they are.
§4Timeline · 6 months
Scroll the log, or step through it with the buttons. Each month the water drops and a fresh line is painted on the gauge where it stood.
Reading M0 · Survey
1,948
crawl errors · flood of record
Before · Survey — Survey
Full crawl, server logs, Search Console coverage and field Core Web Vitals read side by side. 1,948 crawl errors logged; the flood line is painted here.
Gauge 1,948 · LCP 6.3 s · 62 volunteer sign-ups
Month 1 of 6 — Triage
Infinite calendar URLs closed off, robots.txt unblocked /reports/, 322 redirect chains collapsed to single 301 hops. The water starts to fall.
Gauge 1,460 · LCP 6.0 s · 63 volunteer sign-ups
Month 2 of 6 — Rebuild
Thirty-eight plugins replaced with a lean static theme. Every legacy URL mapped from logs to its new home before launch day.
Gauge 905 · LCP 3.8 s · 69 volunteer sign-ups
Month 3 of 6 — Vitals
Responsive AVIF imagery, system fonts, no sliders. Mobile LCP passes 2.5 s at p75 for the first time in field data.
Gauge 470 · LCP 2.4 s · 77 volunteer sign-ups
Month 4 of 6 — Reports
63 grant and field reports given HTML landing pages with abstracts, authors and Report + Dataset markup. Funders can now search them by name.
Gauge 220 · LCP 2.1 s · 85 volunteer sign-ups
Month 5 of 6 — Schema
NGO, Event and VolunteerAction-style structured data for every clean-up day; hreflang pairs Bulgarian and English pages.
Gauge 120 · LCP 2.0 s · 92 volunteer sign-ups
Month 6 of 6 — Gauge
Coverage watched weekly; new 404s alerted within a day. 78 known errors remain, all intentional gone-for-good URLs returning 410.
Gauge 78 · LCP 1.9 s · 98 volunteer sign-ups
§5Results · after 6 months
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
Broken URLs fixed
1,870
Gauge from 1,948 to 78 errors; the remainder are deliberate 410s.
LCP (mobile)
6.3s → 1.9s
| 2.5 s “good” threshold, p75 field data
Organic sessions
+109%
Volunteer sign-ups
+58%
62 → 98 a month once the form worked on every phone and clean-up days showed as events in search.
Modelled Google positions, month 0 vs month 6. “—” means not in the top 100.
| Query | Landing | M0 | M6 | Movement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Danube conservation Rusebrand-adjacent | Home | #14 | #1 | |
| Danube wetland report 2025funder search | Report | — | #2 | |
| доброволци почистване Дунав РусеDanube clean-up volunteers Ruse | Volunteer | #38 | #3 | |
| Danube sturgeon monitoring Bulgariaresearch | Dataset | — | #4 | |
| Русенски Лом биоразнообразиеRusenski Lom biodiversity | Project | #61 | #6 | |
| river NGO grant Bulgariapartner search | About | #47 | #5 | |
| Danube island restorationresearch | Report | #72 | #8 |
§6Your survey
We start where this one did: a full survey of crawl errors, Core Web Vitals and structured data, read like a gauge, with a plan to bring the water down.