Andrus Power

Overview

Andrus Power Solutions is a family-owned generator and electrical contractor in Lee, Massachusetts, on call for the Berkshires since 1991. They sell, install, and service Generac and Kohler standby generators across Western Massachusetts and the neighboring corners of New York and Connecticut.

Their old site lived on a website-builder platform and carried its weight: stock layouts, a heavy stack of tracking tags, and copy nobody could comfortably read. I rebuilt it from the ground up, from visual design through front-end, content, and local SEO.

Andrus Power Solutions homepage hero with the headline 'Power on. Worries off.' beside a photograph of two technicians talking next to a standby generator

The redesign

A generator company sells calm. The design leans into that: a warm paper background, deep navy ink, and one orange accent reserved for the quote button. Photography is documentary, real crews on real installs in real Berkshire weather. Under the hero, a quiet band states the facts that matter to a homeowner choosing a contractor: 35 years, family owned, three states, 24/7 response.

The services section of the Andrus homepage with four cards: generator installation, service and repair, electrical contracting, and generator rentals, above Generac and Kohler dealer badges

Built for Western Massachusetts

Generator work is hyper-local. Whether a house needs a standby unit depends on which side of town it sits: village streets on the gas grid with short outages, or rural roads with long overhead feeders, propane heat, and private wells. The site treats that geography as content, not boilerplate.

There are 37 location pages, one per town and county served, and each one is written by hand. The Great Barrington page knows that Main Street is commercial and runs on Eversource, that Housatonic and Van Deusenville follow the rural pattern, and that the hills toward Egremont are full of second homes that need freeze protection through a January outage. Each town is a structured content entry with its own title, meta description, hero, and coordinates.

The service-area section headed 'Built in the Berkshires, on call when you need us', with a Mapbox map showing the shop in Lee, a service radius, and recent work plotted as dots across Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut

Those same coordinates feed the service-area map: the shop in Lee, the radius the crews cover, and recent jobs plotted as dots across the three states. Below it, every town links to its own page.

The towns and counties index listing the Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut towns Andrus serves, each linking to a dedicated location page

Performance

The numbers were the easiest part of the pitch. The old platform loaded two tag-manager containers, ad pixels, call tracking, and an accessibility overlay from 27 third-party domains. The rebuild is a static Astro site whose only third parties are the fonts and the map.

Requests per page dropped from 115 to 32. Layout shift went from 0.40 to zero. Full page load went from 0.67 to 0.25 seconds. Lighthouse Best Practices went from 58 to 100, and AI readability, how well assistants and crawlers can parse the page, went from 67 to 100. Average sentence length in the copy fell from 41 words to 17, because speed does not help if nobody reads past the first line.

A scorecard comparing the old and new Andrus sites: Lighthouse bars for accessibility, best practices, SEO, and AI readability, and a by-the-numbers list showing requests per page falling from 115 to 32 and third-party domains from 27 to 4

Mobile

People search for generator repair when the power is already out, standing in a dark kitchen with a phone. The mobile layout keeps the phone number and the quote button within thumb reach, collapses the services to a single column, and loads fast on a weak rural connection, which is exactly where the customers are.

Stack

Astro with MDX content collections, Tailwind CSS, and Mapbox GL for the service-area map. Marketing pages, service pages, and town pages are all structured content entries, so new towns and services ship without touching a template. The build is fully static, packed into an nginx container, and deployed automatically on every push to main.