CASE STUDY

Easy Boilers was launched as an experimental online boiler brand with a clear technical objective: to test whether a rapid, headless website architecture could materially improve Google rankings through ultra-fast load times. Built with a React frontend and a WordPress backend, the site was designed to push performance boundaries while remaining flexible for content management. The experiment not only validated key technical SEO theories at the time, but also evolved into a commercially successful business in its own right.

From a performance standpoint, Easy Boilers was exceptionally fast. Achieving Google PageSpeed Insights load times of around 0.8 seconds, the site launched during a period (circa 2021) when SEO discourse was heavily focused on site speed as a core ranking factor. To align with this direction, we invested in a headless React-based frontend — an app-driven user experience — supported by WordPress as the CMS. While expensive to build, it gave us full control over performance and technical optimisation.

To support growth, a consistent £ 5,000-per-month SEO budget underpinned the site focused on content creation, authority building, and technical SEO. Our in-house Essheo team led the campaign, implementing advanced technical optimisations and strategic link acquisition to accelerate rankings in a highly competitive market.

Alongside foundational SEO, we ran targeted PR campaigns aimed at high-authority home improvement and national media publications. These included well-known brands such as Ideal Home, the Daily Mail, The Independent, The Mirror, The Sun, and other prominent news outlets within their home and lifestyle categories. The focus was on relevance and authority, ensuring links carried strong topical trust signals for Google.

We also leveraged proven strategies from our other boiler brands and client campaigns, rapidly deploying what was working best at the time. This allowed Easy Boilers to shortcut typical growth curves and gain visibility far faster than most new entrants in the space.

Over its two-year operational period, Easy Boilers achieved significant commercial success. Through a combination of SEO, PPC, and Meta remarketing campaigns that followed users throughout their buying journey, the site generated over £1.6 million in sales. This was achieved despite low brand awareness, demonstrating what is possible when technical performance, search visibility, and paid amplification are aligned.

Ultimately, the project delivered clear learnings. While headless architecture provided outstanding page speed, it became apparent that such complexity was not essential to rank at the top of Google in the long term. Maintenance costs were high, and simpler architectures were able to achieve comparable results. This was further validated when multiple large online boiler companies adopted headless React builds, only to revert back within a year.

Following the sale of the website, Easy Boilers is now used as a powerful 301 redirect asset, extracting ongoing value from its authority. Looking back, the project was both a commercial win and a crucial real-world case study — proving speed alone isn’t the deciding factor in SEO, while reinforcing how the right strategy can drive exceptional results even for low-awareness brands.