(lab_report // 2026)
Ford Media Lab
//
Web
Ford Media Lab: fordmedialab.com
Our own site, rebuilt to load fast, rank and get cited.
(protocols_deployed)
Web Design & Development
Brand Strategy & World-Building
(01 / the_challenge)
Our site looked the part and underperformed where buyers and search engines actually read it. On a phone, the partnership page took more than six seconds to show its headline. Share images ran as large as 18MB, too heavy for LinkedIn to preview. Report pages told screen readers and search engines nothing but the brand name, and seven of our case studies were reachable from a single link.
(02 / the_approach)
We ran the site like a client account: audit first, one fix at a time, every change verified on the live site before the next. We rebuilt how pages load on mobile, wrote structured data for every case study and essay, sized share images for every platform, wrote alt text for every image, rebuilt internal linking so each report points to its neighbors, and fixed text contrast across the site. Then we found a hosting quirk that served empty pages to the first crawler after every publish, measured it over eight hours, and built the warm-up that fixes it.
(03 / the_work)
(04 / results)
2.1s
Mobile load, partnership headline
99
Mobile performance score
0
Rich results warnings
The partnership page now shows its headline in 2.1 seconds on a phone, down from 6.1, and its mobile performance score went from 78 to 99. Every report and essay passes Google’s rich results test with no warnings. Every share image is under 300KB. Every case study now has three to eight pages linking to it, up from as few as one, and confirmed contrast failures on our core pages fell by more than 90%.
