Poolmasters — 35 years of pools, rebuilt online

The brief

Poolmasters have been building swimming pools and water parks out of Bengaluru for thirty-five years — by their own count, over a thousand pools and fifteen waterparks, for homes, hotels, clubs, resorts and theme parks. Gunite concrete construction, plus the equipment around it: UV ozone disinfection, heat pumps, lighting, landscaping.

They came to the studio for a brochure. Print work — something to hand to a client sitting across a table.

The website came out of that conversation rather than the original brief. Once the brochure had settled how the company presents itself — what it leads with, which projects it shows, how the range of work gets organised — the existing site was visibly a generation behind that thinking. So the same design decisions carried across into a rebuild.

The approach

The brochure set the language, the site inherited it. This is the right order for a business like this one. Print forces choices that a website lets you avoid — you cannot infinite-scroll a brochure, so the hierarchy has to be settled before anything is laid out. Those choices then had somewhere to go.

The gallery is the product. A pool contractor sells on evidence. Every enquiry starts with someone looking at pools that already exist and deciding whether they want that. So the project photography drives the layout rather than sitting in a tab called “Gallery” — and the work is split by the thing a visitor is actually shopping for: pools for homes, hotel and resort pools, sports centre pools, water theme parks.

Every image is now a lazy-loaded, dimensioned WebP. The old site shipped fifty images at full size, none lazy, none carrying width or height. Six files were over 700KB each. That is the entire story of why it was slow, and fixing it is most of the improvement below.

Copy that leads with proof. The old meta description was a keyword list. The new one opens with the numbers — a thousand pools, fifteen waterparks, thirty-five years — because that is the sentence that wins the click and it was buried.

The rebuild, in numbers

Both sites measured on the same throttled-mobile profile — 4× CPU slowdown, 1.6 Mbps, 150ms round-trip, which is roughly a mid-range Android on a patchy connection.

	Old site	Rebuild
Page weight	15,533KB	1,593KB
Image payload	15,373KB	1,113KB
Requests	90	23
Time to first byte	2,849ms	222ms
First paint	3,552ms	920ms
Largest contentful paint	3,696ms	2,808ms
Fully loaded	85,341ms	8,203ms
Lazy-loaded images	0 of 50	47 of 50
Images with dimensions	0 of 50	49 of 50
Horizontal scroll on mobile	yes	no
Console errors	2	0

Eighty-five seconds to eight. On a phone on mobile data, the old site asked for fifteen megabytes before it was done — most visitors never waited.

Two things beyond speed. The old site was serving mixed content: an HTTPS page pulling resources over plain HTTP, which browsers flag and which quietly costs you the padlock. And it scrolled sideways on a phone, which is the single most reliable way to make a site feel broken to someone who cannot name what is wrong with it.

What shipped

A print brochure, and a rebuilt site covering the full range of work — nine service areas, the project gallery, an FAQ and enquiry routing — deployed on Cloudflare Pages.

Structured data and social cards are in place, the heading structure went from one section heading on the whole page to nine, and body copy roughly doubled: search engines now have something to read, and the pages have something to say beyond a slideshow.

The rebuild is complete and cuts over to poolmasters.in shortly.