JVA Music

The site has to do a lot of jobs. It’s a press kit for a debut album. It’s a booking page for a touring artist. It’s a sales funnel for a private drum-teaching practice. And it’s the local-search presence Google needs to surface when someone searches “drum lessons Rochester.”

Squarespace could have done most of this — with a stack of code injections, the premium subscription tier required to enable them, and a site that still felt off-brand underneath. Astro did all of it cleanly, plus things no template could support at all — like a working metronome page baked right into the site.

What’s on the site

• Album section with track-by-track notes, personnel, press coverage, and radio airplay across five stations.
• Drum lessons and group classes pages — structured content local SEO can chew on (location, service area, lesson formats).
• Blog for ongoing content, PDFs for educational material.
• A custom metronome built into the site — the kind of thing template platforms can’t do without an iframe hack.

Under the hood

• Static Astro build, deployed straight to a CDN. Sub-second page loads.
• Full social meta on every page — Open Graph, Twitter cards, canonical URLs, properly sized and alt-texted album art. Release posts share cleanly across platforms.
• Inter font self-hosted and preloaded. No layout shift, no third-party font CDN.
• Mobile-first and accessible. Vanilla JS where it’s needed (the metronome page, interactive forms, navigation), but no React or Vue runtime adding 100kB to every page.

What the numbers say

Three PageSpeed Insights mobile scores, run cold on the same morning:

Site	Mobile Performance
jva-music.com (this site, Astro)	96
jvamusic.squarespace.com (the old build)	42
A well-resourced local music-education competitor	55

Same content, same audience, same scoring tool. The Astro build scores more than 2× the old Squarespace version, and beats a much larger local competitor by 41 points. The drum-lessons page is even more lopsided — 96 on Astro vs. 26 on Squarespace — and the bigger competitor’s hero image takes nearly 25 seconds to render on mobile.

These scores are built on Core Web Vitals — the page-speed signals Google uses to rank search results. Slower page → lower rank → fewer customers walking through the door.

This is what one person with the right tools can do: beating a Squarespace template by 54 points and a well-resourced local competitor by 41.

Why I’m using this as my first case study

This is the site I built when I was still a frustrated small-business owner trying to outrank generic competitors on Google. Everything Squarespace couldn’t do, I fixed here. Everything I now sell at JVA/dev — local SEO, image optimization, clean static builds — I learned by working through this site first.

If you want to know what I can actually build, start here.