In vacation rentals, traffic equals income. A slow site loses Google rankings, lost rankings cost bookings, and lost bookings can cost the year. Joe Godar came to ShakaCode with two connected problems: one site that could no longer deploy and another whose Core Web Vitals were putting desktop rankings at risk.
Five months later, Google Search Console showed 100% Good Core Web Vitals on both mobile and desktop for Emerald Coast By Owner. Every one of its 3,285 measured URLs landed in the green band. Zero Poor. Zero Need Improvement.
What Joe was up against
DestinFlorida had been left on an end-of-life Heroku stack. Heroku had stopped accepting new builds, so nothing could ship. The previous team had attempted the upgrade and stalled on a broken React component path. The codebase also had no continuous integration and no automated test coverage, turning every change into a manual click-through.
Meanwhile, emeraldcoastbyowner.com had recently relaunched. Mobile Core Web Vitals looked workable, but desktop Search Console data showed a sea of orange. For a site competing across tens of thousands of search terms, that was not cosmetic. It was a revenue problem.
Pick one thing, finish it, prove it
ShakaCode's homepage promise is simple: make slow web apps fast, without breaking the site. For iVacationOnline, that meant disciplined steps, measured before and after:
- Rescue the deploy. DestinFlorida was stranded on an end-of-life Heroku stack. Heroku had stopped accepting new builds, Ruby and Rails were years behind, and a prior upgrade attempt had stalled on React rendering. ShakaCode executed the multi-version Ruby and Rails upgrade, fixed the React component path, moved the app onto a supported stack, and unblocked the existing development team.
- Put both sites behind Cloudflare. Emerald Coast By Owner and DestinFlorida moved onto a CDN foundation. Roughly half of all requests now serve from cache, with bot protection and the image-cost foundation needed for the next round of work.
- Optimize against Google Search Console. The team focused on the ranking signal that matters to the business: Search Console field data. Front-end work fixed CLS issues, removed costly image transformations, and added a visual-regression harness so layout and performance changes could be verified before merge.
Wins along the way
- DestinFlorida became deployable again after a multi-version Ruby and Rails upgrade on an end-of-life Heroku stack.
- Emerald Coast By Owner and DestinFlorida moved to Cloudflare, with roughly 50% of requests served from cache.
- Emerald Coast By Owner reached 100% Good Core Web Vitals on mobile and desktop: 3,285 Good URLs, zero Poor, zero Need Improvement.
- A staging visual-regression harness now catches layout shifts and visual regressions before merge.
- Cloudinary transformation costs were attacked at the source, with front-end transformations removed, back-end transformations removed, and a Cloudflare image caching layer stood up.
- Live commerce stayed intact, with zero checkout or inquiry-flow incidents across the engagement.
What changed for iVacationOnline
Joe pushes new content, backlinks, and LLM-targeted material every day. None of that work compounds on a slow site. With Core Web Vitals back in the green, the same marketing budget can compound into rankings, traffic, and bookings instead of paying for ground that keeps slipping.
The harness, CDN foundation, and Core Web Vitals playbook are now in place to repeat the arc on DestinFlorida next.
What Joe said
“The Google Search Console is 100%. I can't tell you how happy that makes me. I think it's almost like a work of art, to be honest with you.”
-- Joe Godar, Founder and Owner, iVacationOnline
“You can't argue with it when your web vitals are all zeros for errors or problems. What do you improve from there? Google thinks we're 100%, so that makes me happy.”
-- Joe Godar, Founder and Owner, iVacationOnline
“We are currently seeing close to dramatic increases in traffic and SEO rankings.”
-- Joe Godar, Founder and Owner, iVacationOnline
“In our world, traffic equals income. If the SEO is better, the traffic goes up. If the site speed is better, the traffic goes up. If the traffic goes up, we sell more subscriptions and get more bookings.”
-- Joe Godar, Founder and Owner, iVacationOnline
“I was afraid I'd get derailed, like I've been derailed from other developers. And I think you and I came to an agreement that we were going to just stay focused on some of these performance issues, and it worked. We stayed on focus and it's A-plus right now.”
-- Joe Godar, Founder and Owner, iVacationOnline
In summary
Two production sites in a portfolio chasing 60,000+ keywords. A tight monthly budget. A customer who had been burned by prior vendors and arrived skeptical of another agency promise. ShakaCode rescued the urgent site so the existing team could ship again, then ran a focused Core Web Vitals campaign until Google Search Console showed 100% Good URLs on both mobile and desktop.
No scope sprawl. Zero checkout regressions. The same playbook is queued for DestinFlorida.
Got a site whose Google Search Console scores aren't where they need to be? Performance work that has to ship without breaking the path to revenue? ShakaCode can help. Reach Justin Gordon at justin@shakacode.com or book a free call.
Whatever the challenge, we can help!
Schedule a free, 30-minute call to discuss what ShakaCode can do for your project. Or email us at contact@shakacode.com with your ideas, challenges, or questions. We'll get back to you within two business days.