You know the saying about the cobbler’s kids having no shoes? That was us. We have spent the last decade building websites for Iowa businesses and nonprofits, and our own site was running on a patchwork of old Divi layouts, a bloated plugin stack, and content that had been revised so many times it lost its focus.
So we burned it down and started fresh.
Not a redesign. Not a migration. A completely new build on a clean WordPress install with Divi 5, a custom child theme, and zero leftover baggage from the old site.
What we actually built
The new team218.com is 35 pages of original content. Every page was written from scratch with specific search intent in mind. No recycled copy. No template content with city names swapped in.
The technical stack is intentionally lean. We replaced RankMath with a custom SEO engine written directly in our child theme’s functions.php. It handles meta titles, descriptions, canonical URLs, Open Graph tags, Twitter Cards, and robots directives for every page on the site. About 300 lines of PHP. No plugin dependency. No database bloat. No update conflicts.
We did the same thing with schema markup. Instead of letting a plugin generate generic schema, we wrote custom JSON-LD for every page. LocalBusiness, WebPage, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage, CollectionPage, Service, and Offer schema, all injected through Divi Code Modules with exact control over what Google and AI search tools see.
The CSS is a single 621-line file organized into 18 sections. Flexbox throughout. No CSS Grid (Divi’s validator does not play well with it). No inline styles scattered across 40 different module settings. One file controls the entire visual system, and cache busting is handled through a version parameter in the enqueue.
Fonts are self-hosted. DM Sans and DM Serif Display load from our own server instead of making a round trip to Google’s CDN. That eliminates the external DNS lookup and shaves 200 to 400 milliseconds off the first paint.
Why we did it this way
Every decision came back to one question: does this make the site faster, more maintainable, or easier for search engines and AI to understand?
Plugins are convenient. They are also dependencies. Every plugin you install is code you do not control, written by someone with different priorities, updated on a schedule you cannot predict. When a plugin conflicts with a theme update or a WordPress core release, you are at the mercy of someone else’s timeline. We eliminated that risk for the things that matter most: SEO, schema, and styling.
The content architecture matters just as much. We built 11 city service area pages covering Iowa from Des Moines to Dubuque. Each one has unique local content, named suburbs, city-specific proof sections, and FAQPage schema with six questions. These are not doorway pages. They are real content targeting real search queries from real Iowa business owners.
We also added an llms.txt file in the site root. It is a markdown file designed for AI crawlers that tells language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity which pages matter most and what Team 218 actually does. Google has not officially endorsed it yet, but Anthropic publishes one on their own site, and over 844,000 websites have implemented it. The downside is zero. The upside is being ready when AI search adoption accelerates.
What this means for our clients
Everything we built for ourselves is what we build for you. The same custom schema. The same clean CSS architecture. The same lean plugin philosophy. The same content strategy built for both Google and AI-powered search.
If your website is running on a stack of plugins you do not understand, content you have not updated in two years, and a design that looks like it was built in 2019, we should talk.
Call or text 319-333-0815. Or start with a free website audit and we will show you exactly where your site stands.
– Chuck