How a Full Website Revamp Lifted Engagement by 164% Without Touching Conversion Rates
City Power and Gas had been running on the same website foundation for over a decade. We rebuilt it from the ground up — in 63 days, with zero downtime, zero campaign disruption, and a homepage performance score that jumped from 33 to 98.
A decade-old acquisition platform, rebuilt for the next decade.
City Power and Gas is one of the largest residential energy suppliers in New York and Pennsylvania. Their website is the core engine that converts energy switchers into customers — not a brochure, an acquisition platform.
The platform had been accumulating technical debt for over ten years — not failing outright, but quietly working against the brand's ability to scale. The design no longer matched the quality of the brand. Performance scores were in the red. Campaign landing pages were unstable. Every attempt to improve the platform introduced new risk rather than new capability.
The objective was a full-site revamp — modern UX, clean architecture, optimised performance, protected SEO — completed while the business kept running without disruption. No downtime, no campaign breaks, no tracking gaps. City Power and Gas needed a platform that didn't just look better, but was architecturally ready to scale into new markets as the brand grew beyond New York and Pennsylvania.
A decade of technical debt, running in silence.
The site wasn't broken in an obvious way — it was still generating leads. But underneath, every part of the platform was working against the brand's ability to grow.
Seven focus areas. One guiding constraint.
The brief wasn't just "redesign the website." It was "redesign the website without anyone noticing the transition" — no organic traffic dip, no broken campaigns, no lost tracking data, no downtime.
Every section, rebuilt from scratch.
The revamp touched every page — not just reskinned, but rethought. Five sections that show the scale of the transformation.
Before and after — by the numbers.
Every core page was benchmarked on Google Lighthouse before go-live. The same benchmark was run again after launch. Here's what changed.
performance score
desktop Lighthouse
performance score
The homepage — highest-traffic page on the site — went from a failing Desktop performance score of 33 to a near-perfect 98, a +197% improvement. Best Practices scores, previously inconsistent page to page, are now standardised at 96–100 across the board. Post-launch, the platform reached strong stabilisation across nearly every core page — a level of technical consistency the legacy platform had never achieved.
What made 63 days possible.
A full revamp for a live, revenue-generating acquisition site — across two states, with active paid campaigns running throughout — is not a simple build. Here's what was managed simultaneously, and validated before every deployment step.
- Pennsylvania migration — from legacy subdomain to scalable, directory-based URL architecture
- Full content retention — nothing was lost in the transition to the new platform
- Active paid campaigns — running throughout the build and migration window with zero disruption
- SEO continuity — maintained through the entirety of the migration and post-launch period
- Legacy dependency unwind — existing functionality carefully preserved while the old architecture was replaced
- Multi-workstream coordination — design, development, content, and tracking running in parallel across all 63 days
- Core Web Vitals testing across all page templates
- Redirect chain and broken link validation
- Cross-browser and mobile device testing
- Structured data testing
- GA4, Google Ads, and Pixel tracking validation
- Organic traffic monitoring baseline established
- Enrollment tracking verification
Questions about this engagement
Everything you need to know about how First Launch delivered a full website revamp for City Power and Gas in 63 days.
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The 63-day timeline was possible because of a phase-led build process that kept the live site completely untouched until each validated stage was ready. We built and tested the new platform in parallel with the existing site — no switchover happened until every page, redirect, tracking tag, and Core Web Vitals benchmark had been verified. The phased approach meant the team could de-risk at every stage rather than betting the entire migration on a single launch moment.
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SEO protection was built into the project architecture from day one, not added as an afterthought. This included full URL mapping for every existing page, comprehensive redirect planning, structured data validation, and post-launch organic traffic monitoring. The Pennsylvania subdomain consolidation — migrating from pa.citypowerandgas.com to citypowerandgas.com/pa/ — was handled with complete redirect coverage so no link equity was lost in the transition.
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A Lighthouse Desktop Performance score of 33 means the page is failing against Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds — slow load times, poor interactivity, and layout instability that both degrades user experience and signals low quality to search algorithms. In practical terms, it means pages that drive users away before they convert and organic rankings that are being suppressed by a performance penalty. The jump to 98 eliminates both problems simultaneously.
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Search engines treat subdomains as semi-independent properties, which means links and authority built to citypowerandgas.com were not fully shared with pa.citypowerandgas.com. By consolidating Pennsylvania under citypowerandgas.com/pa/, the entire domain now benefits from a unified authority pool. This also simplifies analytics reporting, campaign tracking, and governance — and creates a repeatable template for adding new states without fragmenting the brand's digital footprint each time.
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This combination is actually the most meaningful validation of the revamp. The UX redesign made the site meaningfully better at holding user attention — cleaner layouts, faster load times, and a visual hierarchy that guides users through the content rather than losing them. Because the conversion architecture (enrollment flows, CTAs, tracking) was carried over intact and validated before go-live, the improved experience added engagement without disrupting the actions users were already taking. Users spent more time, and the actions that matter to the business remained stable at 99.9%.
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