Dirt Brothers Landscaping

The Brief

Dirt Brothers came to me with a site that looked fine and worked, mostly. The problem wasn’t visible from the outside. It was underneath.

The previous build sat on Bricks Builder with a stack of premium plugins layered on top. Kyle and Ethan didn’t pick that stack. The previous developer did, and that developer was no longer in the picture. What Dirt Brothers inherited was a site they couldn’t confidently edit themselves, built on tools they were paying recurring license fees for, with no clear path to maintain it long-term without hiring another developer at full rate.

That’s a quietly painful position for a small business to be in. Everything works until it doesn’t, and when something breaks you’re either learning a complex page builder under pressure or paying someone to fix a problem you didn’t cause.

The brief I worked from:

• Get off the dependency treadmill. No more recurring plugin licenses, no more page builder lock-in, no more “the developer who built this isn’t around anymore” risk.
• Keep what’s working. The site’s structure, photography, and tone were good. Kyle and Ethan have years of real project photos and a roster of solid testimonials. None of that needed reinventing.
• Make it maintainable by the owners. Kyle should be able to swap out a homepage photo, update a service description, or add a testimonial without calling me.
• Don’t lose any SEO ground. The site was ranking for local landscaping searches. A migration done badly tanks rankings overnight. This one couldn’t.

The constraint that shaped the most decisions was simple: stay on the free tier of Kadence. Every dollar of recurring license fees the new site avoided was a dollar Kyle and Ethan keep every year, forever.

What I Built

A full rebuild on WordPress, Kadence, and Kadence Blocks. No premium plugins, no recurring licenses, no page builder that holds the content hostage if you ever want to migrate again.

A few specific decisions worth calling out:

Custom post types converted to standard pages. The previous Bricks build used a custom post type for each service. That kind of structure has its place, but here it was overkill, and it pushed the site into needing Kadence Pro features to display properly. By converting the service entries to standard WordPress pages with a consistent layout, the site stayed on the free Kadence tier without losing any functionality the business actually uses. Visitors can’t tell the difference. Kyle and Ethan get a simpler editor experience. The annual license bill drops to zero.

Three dedicated service pages. Landscaping, lawn care, and hardscaping each get their own URL and their own page. That matters for two reasons. First, local SEO: a Kelowna homeowner searching “hardscaping Kelowna” should land directly on the hardscaping page, not the homepage. Second, sales clarity: each service has different language, different photos, and different selling points, and one combined page would water all three down.

The work gallery does the heavy lifting on the homepage. Landscaping is a visual purchase. Nobody books a hardscaping crew based on a tagline. They book based on “can these guys actually build the patio I want.” The homepage gallery sits prominently above the testimonials and links out to the Dirt Brothers Instagram, where Kyle and Ethan post fresh work regularly. The website doesn’t have to compete with social, it complements it.

Testimonials with full names and context. Real names, real specifics. One from a strata manager at Mission Shores, one from a residential client who praises responsiveness, one from a strata that needed a deadline pulled off. The mix matters: it signals to both residential homeowners and commercial property managers that Dirt Brothers handles their kind of work.

Tracking and verification kept clean. Google Search Console and Site Kit are properly set up, so Kyle and Ethan can actually see what’s bringing visitors in.

The Result

Dirt Brothers Landscaping had a site built on Bricks Builder with a stack of premium plugins. The site looked fine but the build was fragile, the recurring license costs added up, and the previous developer was no longer in the picture. They wanted a clean, maintainable site they could keep running for years without ongoing developer dependency.