Skip to content

Case studiesEnergy

Involve Energy

The platform our sister company runs on, built from scratch: a dawn film that works out an example farm's solar as you scroll, a calculator that starts where the film ends, and 27 pages built for search. 97 on mobile and 100 on desktop in Google PageSpeed Insights.

Build your growth plan

Outcome

97

Mobile performance in Google PageSpeed Insights

Client

Involve Energy

Industry

Energy

Region

South Island, NZ

Services touched

  • Web
  • Search
  • Content

01The challenge

A solar company that had to prove it was different before anyone picked up the phone.

Involve Energy is our sister company. It brings commercial and agricultural solar, battery storage and electrification to the South Island's productive businesses: dairy farms, orchards, packhouses, wineries, processors and manufacturers. It works out the system, arranges the finance and manages the installation end to end, and it models every project conservatively from the customer's actual power bills.

That is a hard thing to say on a website, because solar is sold hard. Farmers have heard the best-case numbers before, and a lot of what looks like advice online is a lead form that passes the enquiry on to several installers. The site had to show the difference before anyone rang: how a project is really worked out, an honest indicative number in thirty seconds with no contact details asked for, and pages built for the searches a Southland dairy farmer or a Marlborough winery actually makes.

The Involve Energy homepage on a phone: a dark farm landscape before sunrise, under the line 'Before sunrise, the milking runs on bought power.'
The film opens before sunrise. On a phone it is cut square for the screen, not shrunk.

02The approach

A film you scroll, and a calculator that starts where it ends.

The homepage opens on First Light, a short film of a dairy farm at dawn that moves only as the visitor scrolls: the plains before sunrise, the milking shed in the mist, first light on a solar roof. Beside it a ledger fills in the four steps every project runs (measure, design, finance, outcome) for an example farm spending $3,500 a month on power, modelled with the site's own calculator and labelled plainly as illustrative. The calculator underneath starts where the film ends, with the same farm loaded, and prints every assumption behind its answer beneath the result.

None of it comes from a template. The site is a Next.js build written for this business, with no theme and no page builder, and the film is engineered to cost as little as it can. On a desktop it is 96 AVIF frames, 2.6 MB in all; phones get their own square cut of 48 frames, 482 KB. The frames are decoded off the main thread, and the browser's own scrolling drives the film, so keyboard scrolling and find-in-page keep working. Visitors who prefer reduced motion get the film's four stills instead, and so does anyone on Save-Data or a 2G connection.

The numbers are tested like code, because they are code: the calculator's engine has 24 automated tests of its own, and the platform 157.

The end of the film on a phone: solar panels across the shed roof with its loads marked, above the finished ledger showing a saving of $11,255 to $13,235 a year for the example farm
The ledger fills in as you scroll. The calculator below starts from the same example farm.

03The result

Built for search, sector by region. 97 on mobile.

Search is built into the structure rather than bolted on. Every one of the 27 pages in the sitemap has its own title and description, a canonical address and a single H1. Ten sector-by-region pages (dairy farms in Southland, Otago and Canterbury, wineries in Marlborough and Central Otago, orchards and packhouses, cold stores, irrigation, aquaculture and manufacturing) each open with a short answer before the detail, and nine guides take the questions that come before a purchase: what a feasibility study involves, buy-back rates, finance and the Investment Boost.

Underneath, structured data tells search engines and AI assistants what each page is: Service markup on the ten sector pages, FAQPage on those and on all nine guides, BreadcrumbList on every sector page and guide, and an Organization record on every page. An llms.txt file describes the site for AI assistants, and the robots file admits every crawler.

The site is months old, which is too early to judge it on rankings. What can be measured today is how it is built. Google PageSpeed Insights scores it 100 for Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO on mobile and desktop in every run, and it passes both applicable Agentic Browsing checks. Performance takes a median of 97 on mobile and scores 100 on desktop in all five runs, with the film on the page and no layout shift at all.

The deeper outcomes

Behind the headline metric.

In the work

The homepage as it opens: a farm landscape before sunrise under 'Before sunrise, the milking runs on bought power', with the empty ledger beside it
The film's last frame: solar panels across the shed roof at sunrise, the vacuum and milk pumps, hot water, milk chilling and yard wash marked, and the ledger complete
Three phone screens: the film before sunrise, the finished ledger under the solar roof, and the calculator
The calculator page, 'What would solar do for your power bill?', with the farm inputs and the indicative numbers side by side
A sector-by-region page, solar for Southland dairy farms, opening with a short answer beside a worked example
Three phone screens: the Southland dairy page, a guide to feasibility studies and the guides index
A guide, what a commercial solar feasibility study includes and when you need one, with its short answer first
The guides index: commercial and farm solar, explained with real numbers

What's next

The site is months old, so the next measurement is Search Console across the ten sector-by-region pages once they have had a season to settle. The page set grows region by region with the business: a new sector-and-region page is a content entry, not a rebuild. And the calculator's assumptions are versioned and dated, so when tariffs, incentives or loan terms change, the numbers on the page change with them and say when.

Related

Other engagements that ship the same kind of outcome.

Start

Want this kind of outcome for your business?

The strategist below picks up the same lens we used for Involve Energy. Tell them what you're trying to grow. By the end of the conversation you'll have a plan, a quote, and a senior strategist on the line.

Build your growth plan