Case study, client project

Apartment Jestrab

A mountain apartment in Janské Lázně, Czech Republic. I built its website at the end of 2025, then rebuilt it for speed in 2026. This page is mostly about the second part: what I changed and what the numbers were before and after.

apartmanjestrab.cz → Holiday rental · four languages · online booking · 2025 to 2026

Late 2025 · version one

The site and the booking system

The full site, built on a page builder so the owner could start taking bookings quickly. Four languages, and a booking calendar with my own Booking.com link-up: a scheduled job keeps bookings matched in both directions, so the apartment can't be double-booked. Plus the print side: a poster and business cards for the apartment.

2026 · version two

The speed rebuild

The page builder had made the site slow. I rebuilt the front end by hand and left the booking system running untouched. The rest of this page is that rebuild.

Business cards for Apartment Jestrab: a white front with the gold AJ15 monogram and the tagline U nás je nejlíp, and a back with the apartment's contact details and a QR code. — The print side: business cards for the apartment, front and back. Czech tagline: *U nás je nejlíp*, "it's best at our place".

The result first

Loads two and a half times faster, with a seventh of the code.

73 → 94: Google mobile score
85 → 98: Google desktop score
7.2 s → 2.9 s: how long until the page looks done on a phone
238 KB → 33 KB: homepage size, as served
14 s → 0.15 s: worst measured load time for a single gallery photo
5 min: total downtime for the server move

Before: Google's PageSpeed test on the live site, 16 August 2026. After: the same test on the same live site on 17 October 2026, after the rebuild, the server move and the new delivery network. See Google's report ↗

Before / after

The same photos, words and booking system.

Drag the handle. The content is identical: the owner's copy and the owner's photographs, moved onto a layout that gets out of their way.

apartmanjestrab.cz/en

The rebuilt homepage: warm oak palette, large photography, key facts on a card overlapping the hero.

The original page-builder homepage: grey type, a flat fact bar, the same hero photo.

Before After, hand-coded Compare before and after

What was wrong

Three separate problems that looked like one.

"The site is slow" turned out to be three unrelated causes. Measuring first meant fixing the right ones, in the right order.

A page builder sending 238 KB of code with every page. Two thirds of each page was styling pasted into the page itself, including every weight of two Google font families, downloaded again on every visit because it could not be cached.
An overloaded server. Plain files came down at 100 to 300 KB a second, and a 20 KB page once took 11.7 seconds. I documented it and sent the measurements to the host, who confirmed the machine was overloaded and moved the account to a healthier one.
Images built for desktops only. Every phone downloaded full-width photos, and the main photo was set up in a way the browser could not start downloading until 1.3 seconds into the page load.

What I did

A front end written by hand, and nothing else touched.

Rebuilt the front end

One stylesheet, one small script, self-hosted fonts, and nothing extra except on the booking page, where the calendar needs its own helper. The homepage went from 238 KB to 33 KB.

Kept the booking system running

The booking calendar, my Booking.com link-up and the contact mailing all kept running untouched through the whole rebuild. A calendar holding real reservations is not the place to experiment.

Four languages, properly

Czech, English, Polish and German, each with its own text file. I checked every page for Czech leaking into translations, and the site now picks the visitor's language from their browser.

Fixed the delivery

Moved to a healthier server (5 minutes of downtime), put a free delivery network in front so photos come from the nearest point, and generated every photo at three widths so a phone never downloads a desktop-sized image.

Measured, not guessed

Every number here came from a tool, not a feeling.

Homepage size

238 KB 33 KB

Styling pasted into every page

154 KB 0 KB

One honest note: the booking page scored 86 on mobile rather than 94. A live availability calendar can't be prepared ahead of time, and the calendar brings its own helper code. I left it that way on purpose: a working booking system beats a few extra points on a test.

Want the same done for your site?

I measure first, tell you what's actually slow, and fix only what needs it.

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