← All Field Notes
SEC 01/ FIELD NOTES
I Rebuilt a Dance Studio's Website in Four Days. Traffic Is Up Nearly 6x.
The old site had four days left before it went dark for good. That part was on purpose... I didn't want to keep paying for a platform that couldn't do the cool modern things I wanted for it.
I do the marketing and web strategy for Dance Xtreme New York, a dance studio in Hauppauge, Long Island that everyone calls DXNY. Last spring I moved their site off Squarespace and rebuilt it from scratch around one question: what does a dance parent actually need from this site?
The short version of what happened since: in January the site got 916 visits. In July it got 5,337. Traffic has climbed every single month this year, with zero ad spend behind it. The rest of this post is how we got there... including the part where we had four days to pull it off.
(I wrote about leaving Squarespace for my own site here. This is the client-side sequel.)
The Old Site Was on Borrowed Time
We'd let the DXNY Squarespace account lapse at the end of March, and the grace period ran out April 13. I wrote the project brief on April 9. We soft-launched the new site on April 12.
Four days. I don't recommend doing it that way... but I'll admit the deadline did something useful. There was no room to debate fonts for three weeks. Every decision came down to whether it helps a parent find a class, see a price, or sign their kid up.
One thing we deliberately did NOT do was rebrand. The crown logo, the colors, the "Rise & Reign" tagline... all of it carried straight over. Families already knew the brand and loved it... the rebuild was about everything underneath it.
What Parents Couldn't Do on the Old Site
When I audited the old site before the rebuild, the problems weren't cosmetic. They were things an actual parent would hit:
- The class schedule was dense tables with seasonal content mixed together. Hard to read on a desktop, brutal on a phone.
- Registration was a dead end. The "Parent Portal" button dumped you onto a third-party system with no explanation of what it was or what to do there.
- Pricing, schedule, and programs lived on disconnected pages... so answering "what would this cost for my 6-year-old" meant a scavenger hunt.
- The About page had no instructor bios or photos. Parents are trusting these people with their kids. They want to see faces.
- Popups and dense tables everywhere on mobile, which is where most parents actually are.
None of this was Squarespace's fault, exactly. Some of it was template limits, some of it was years of content piling up. Either way, a parent who couldn't find an answer wasn't going to dig for it.
I Rebuilt It for a Parent at 9pm on Their Phone
That was the whole design brief. A tired parent, on the couch, phone in hand, trying to figure out if dance fits their kid's life.
The schedule page now. Filter by age, then read straight down the day... style, time, ages, and who is teaching it, on one line each.
Every feature had to serve that person:
- A schedule you can actually read. Season toggle, calendar view, filterable by style. The single biggest complaint about the old site, fixed first.
- A clear path for two kinds of parents. Some arrive thinking "fun weekly class," some arrive thinking "competition team." The site meets both at the door and walks each one down their own path, from Mommy & Me on up.
- Real checkout. The old store had three master class tickets and "in-store pickup only." Now it runs on Stripe... pick the class, pay on your phone, done.
- Faces. Instructor bios with photos, and real parent testimonials on the homepage. One mom wrote that the teachers are "top notch, loving and passionate." That does more selling than any copy I could write.
The Traffic Chart Tells the Rest
916 visits in January. 5,337 in July. Every month higher than the one before, seven months straight, without a dollar of ads.
OLD SITEREBUILT SITE
916
1,209
1,495
1,628
1,817
2,493
5,337
JANFEBMARAPRMAYJUNJUL
+ SHOW THE NUMBERS− HIDE THE NUMBERS
| MONTH | SESSIONS | SITE |
|---|---|---|
| January 2026 | 916 | Old |
| February 2026 | 1,209 | Old |
| March 2026 | 1,495 | Old |
| April 2026 | 1,628 | Rebuilt |
| May 2026 | 1,817 | Rebuilt |
| June 2026 | 2,493 | Rebuilt |
| July 2026 | 5,337 | Rebuilt |
I want to be careful with the claim here, because I hate inflated case studies. The new site launched mid-April, so it doesn't get credit for every month on that chart. Count only the months it was live... April's 1,628 to July's 5,337... and it's still 3.3x in three months. What it gets credit for: when people started showing up, the site finally gave them a reason to stay and a way to sign up. The old one never did.
Questions I Keep Getting From Other Business Owners
Should I move my business website off Squarespace?
Not automatically. If the template fits how you work and you're not fighting it, stay. I spent a decade on Squarespace myself before leaving, and I wrote up that whole decision separately. The honest test: if you keep shrinking your ideas down to what the template allows, that's the signal to start looking.
Will redesigning my website hurt my Google rankings?
It can, if you're careless... changing every URL with no redirects is the classic self-inflicted wound. In DXNY's case, traffic went up after the redesign, not down. Treat your existing pages and URLs as assets you're moving, not junk you're throwing out, and a redesign becomes an upgrade instead of a reset.
How long until a new website shows SEO results?
Think in months, not weeks. DXNY's growth compounded across seven months... no single week ever looked dramatic. What made it compound was pages that answer real questions, left up long enough to do their job. If you need results next week, a redesign is the wrong tool... that's what ads are for.
Do I need a blog on my small business website?
For a local business I'd say yes, and DXNY convinced me. Parents don't search for your studio's name until they already know you exist. They search their questions... what age to start dance, what to expect at a first competition. A blog is how your site shows up in those moments.
If Your Site Has the Same Problems
If you read the "what parents couldn't do" list and winced because your own site does the same things to your customers... that's fixable, and it doesn't have to take months.
I take on this kind of work. Get in touch if you want to talk through what a rebuild could look like for your business. And if you're more the do-it-yourself type, my Squarespace post covers the stack I build with now.
Real talk: DXNY is a client... I run their marketing and web strategy, so I'm not a neutral bystander on this one. The traffic numbers come straight from their Google Analytics, and nobody paid to boost them. And yes, I build with AI tools in the mix, same as everything else I make.
SEC 03/ DIRECT LINE
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