Andy and Alex Schwartz didn’t ask for a 52% traffic lift. They asked us to build them a website that didn’t look like every other HVAC company in Gainesville.
Twenty days after we launched it, their visitor count was up 52% over the previous twenty days on Squarespace. Engagement rate more than doubled. Google Search Console picked up 5,400 impressions in week one. And the page everyone forgets — the thank-you page — was averaging seven minutes and seventeen seconds of attention per visit.
This is what actually happened when we replaced their template site with something built for the work they do.
Where Eagle AC Started
Eagle AC Heating & Cooling is a family-owned HVAC company serving Gainesville and eleven surrounding towns. Two brothers, real licenses, same-day service, no overtime surcharge. The kind of operator that does the work the right way and earns five-star reviews one job at a time.
Their old website didn’t tell that story.
It was a Squarespace template. Same fonts as every other home-services site in Florida. Same stock photos. Same generic “we offer AC repair and installation” copy. The phones rang because the work is good — not because the site was earning attention.
We pulled the trailing-twenty-day numbers off Squarespace Analytics before we cut over to the new build. 192 visits. 252 pageviews. 78.89% bounce rate. And worth flagging: the source breakdown included Tor exit nodes — bot traffic that Squarespace doesn’t filter out. The real human number was lower.
The Squarespace site was also on a negative 79% year-over-year slide. Whatever was working in 2025 had stopped working. Replacing it wasn’t a vanity project. It was a rescue.
What We Built
Three weeks of work. One launch day: May 12, 2026.
Here’s what shipped:
A custom WordPress build. Hand-coded layout, real schema markup, no drag-and-drop template. The site is owned by Eagle AC, hosted on the same enterprise stack the rest of our client roster runs on.
A conversion-tuned thank-you page. Every form submitter lands on a page with a one-tap “Save Our Number” feature. When Andy or Alex calls back, the screen reads “Eagle AC” — not an unknown 352 area code. Small thing. Massive impact on whether the lead actually picks up.
A free HVAC diagnostic tool. An interactive page that lets a homeowner answer a few questions about what their system is doing and get a likely-cause-and-cost estimate before they even pick up the phone. The old site had no top-of-funnel content. The new one has a magnet.
Twelve city-specific service-area pages. A dedicated landing page for every city Eagle AC serves — Gainesville, Newberry, Alachua, High Springs, Tioga, Jonesville, Windsor, Micanopy, Waldo, La Crosse, Archer, Brooker. Each one targets the “AC repair [city]” query for its own market.
A membership program page that actually sells. The Eagle Care Plan landing page is built to convert. Annual maintenance is the highest-value lead type a residential HVAC operator can generate, and the page is engineered to make signing up feel obvious.
Press validation integrated into the home page. WUFT (UF’s local PBS/NPR station) interviewed the brothers about North Central Florida cold snaps. That video is embedded above the fold. Third-party credibility in the first scroll.
Branded link previews everywhere. Custom Open Graph metadata so every share — by text, iMessage, Facebook, anywhere — unfurls as a full-bleed branded preview. Every casual mention works like a free ad.
Google Analytics 4 and Search Console wired up at launch. Site Kit installed and configured day one so everything that happens from here forward is measured.
The Numbers, Twenty Days In
We pulled a side-by-side comparison: the twenty days before launch on Squarespace versus the first twenty days after launch on the new site.
Visitors. Squarespace: 192. New site: 292. A 52% lift.
Pageviews. Squarespace: 252. New site: 534. More than double.
Engagement rate. This is where it gets interesting. Squarespace reported a 78.89% bounce rate — meaning only about 21% of visitors did anything more than land and leave. The new site’s weighted engagement rate across the top pages is roughly 48%. Engagement more than doubled.
Google Search Console impressions. Squarespace wasn’t even configured to track this. The new site picked up 5,400 impressions in twenty-eight days. Brand searches for “eagle ac heating and cooling” started showing up in week one. High-intent local queries like “ac repair gainesville fl” pulled 109 impressions on their own.
Traffic quality. The Squarespace data included bot traffic from Tor exit nodes. The new site, on GA4, filters that out. So the 292 visitor number isn’t just higher than 192 — it’s cleaner. Apples-to-apples, the lift is bigger than the headline suggests.
Year-over-year context. Squarespace was running -79% year-over-year. The new site reset that baseline at a higher floor in its first week.
Where Visitors Are Actually Going
The top pages tell the real story:
- Homepage — 294 pageviews, 261 sessions
- Schedule HVAC Service — 38 pageviews, 76.47% engagement rate
- About — The Schwartz Brothers Story — 27 pageviews, 84.62% engagement rate, 1m 23s average time
- Eagle Care Plan membership — 21 pageviews, 75% engagement rate
- Free HVAC Diagnostic Tool — 12 pageviews, 70% engagement rate
A few things to notice.
The Schedule Service page is the second most-visited page on the entire site. Visitors are skipping past the homepage and going straight to the booking form. That is the funnel we built the site for.
The About page has the highest engagement rate of any top-ten page — 84.62%. Real people want to know who they’re hiring before they pick up the phone. The Schwartz Brothers story is doing exactly that work.
And the thank-you page. Average time on the thank-you page is seven minutes and seventeen seconds. That’s not people getting confused and staring at the screen. That’s the Save Our Number feature pulling its weight — leads are staying on the page long enough to add Eagle AC to their phone contacts. The next time their AC quits, they have the number already.
What This Says About Squarespace and Template Sites
Squarespace is fine. It’s not the villain in this story. For a personal portfolio, an artist’s site, or a brand-new business that just needs a placeholder, it does the job.
For a service business that lives and dies on local search traffic, scheduled bookings, and converting first-time visitors into multi-year customers — Squarespace leaves money on the table. The template framework is restrictive. The conversion paths are generic. The technical SEO is shallow. And the analytics are thin enough that you don’t even know how much money is being left on the table.
Replacing a template site with a custom build isn’t always the right call. But when the work behind the brand is good and the website is the bottleneck, the lift can be immediate and measurable.
In Eagle AC’s case, it was.
What’s Coming Next for Eagle AC
The website is just one of three Imperium services running for Eagle AC. The Google Ads campaign has been running for months. A connected-TV commercial — filmed by Ryan Keith Films — is in post-production and will start running on Hulu, ESPN, and other premium streaming inventory mid-summer.
All three services feed the same brand. The website backs the ads. The ads back the website. The CTV commercial puts the brothers’ faces on the same screen as national HVAC brands. That’s how local home-services businesses compete and win.
Want To See What This Could Look Like For Your Business?
If your website is doing what Eagle AC’s old Squarespace site was doing — looking generic, ranking nowhere, and converting almost nobody — we should talk.
We’re Imperium Marketing Solutions, based in Gainesville. We build custom WordPress sites, run Google Ads campaigns that actually make money, and produce connected-TV commercials for local businesses that want to look as big as the national chains.
Read the full Eagle AC case study on our portfolio. Browse our other work to see the rest of the roster. Or book a discovery call and tell us what you’re trying to grow. Two-campaign minimum to start at $500 per campaign per month, any channel — web, Google Ads, or CTV.
The next case study could be yours.
