The BraveHeart Men had a message worth finding and a website that made it hard to find. In three days, Gridwell moved the ministry off Wix, gave it online giving for the first time and made the site far faster on phones.
The Client
A Training Community for Men of God
The BraveHeart Men is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that trains and inspires men toward their full identity, mission and impact in Christ. Its core program, the BraveHeart Intensive, helps a man name who he is, what he’s here to do, what he values and what could take him out. More than 600 men have been through it.
The organization runs on volunteers. There’s no paid staff, and the leaders give their own time to retreats, courses and a weekly video talk called Man Talk Monday.
This one was personal for us. BraveHeart has had a real impact on the life of Gridwell founder Tray Lovvorn, and he wanted its website to reflect the caliber of the work and reach more men.
The Problem
A Nonprofit With No Way to Give
The site had been kept alive by volunteers on Wix, and the gaps had piled up:
- No path for donors. The site never mentioned that BraveHeart is a 501(c)(3). It had no giving page and no Donate button.
- Template content was still live. Six demo blog posts, placeholder coaching services and a contact link to info@mysite.com were all published and indexed.
- Dead ends. Apply buttons on the Leader Guild page went nowhere, and a retreat that had already happened was still listed as upcoming.
- Signups in pieces. Registration was split across Wix Forms, Constant Contact and an outside billing system.
- Thin search signals. Only 3 of the 17 main pages had a meta description, and there was almost no structured data.
- Slow on phones. On a throttled mobile connection, the home page’s main content took 9.3 seconds to appear.
The Rebuild
One Clear Path for Men, and One for Donors
We pulled the pages, photos and videos from the old site on 11/03/2026, built the new one and launched it on 11/05/2026.
The story comes first. The new site leads with the question a man is actually asking: who am I, and what am I here for? From there it walks him through a simple path: start in the free Brotherhood, go through the BraveHeart Intensive, then become a Champion so the next man can go.
Giving now exists. A new Give page takes one-time gifts, and a Champions page invites monthly support. A goal bar reads from the payment system, so donors see real progress toward the monthly goal.
One application. Every Apply button on the site opens the same form in a pop-up, connected to Agora Suite. Scholarships have their own form, so cost doesn’t end the conversation.
The teaching is easy to find. More than 170 videos from BraveHeart’s YouTube channel now sit in one library, searchable by topic or speaker. New talks can be pulled in without rebuilding pages by hand.
A way to reach out. A web chat on the home page, connected to Agora Suite, gives a visitor somewhere to start a conversation when a form feels like too much.
Fast and hard to break. The site is static HTML on Cloudflare, with no plugins or database. Past events drop off automatically when the site builds. Old Wix addresses redirect to the right new pages, so existing links keep working.
The Search Strategy
Pages Built for the Questions Men Are Asking
Michael gave us 22 terms he wants BraveHeart to be found for, from “Christian men’s group” to “how to find my purpose as a man” and “how to go deeper with God.” Some fit pages the site already had, so we tuned those titles and descriptions. Most of the how-to questions had nowhere to land.
A man typing one of those questions isn’t looking for BraveHeart yet. He’s looking for an answer. To reach him, the site needed pages built around his question, not around the organization. So we added a Guides section: five guides on purpose, identity, negative patterns, relationships and going deeper with God, plus a page on training, mentoring and coaching.
- One strong page per topic. Each page covers a cluster of related searches, instead of a thin page for every term.
- The answer comes first. Each guide opens with a short, direct answer, then uses question headings and an FAQ. That’s the format search engines and AI assistants can quote.
- Teaching only BraveHeart can publish. The guides are drawn from 16 Man Talk Monday talks, with the leaders’ own stories and the videos on the page. That gives search engines something original, not generic advice.
- Every answer has a next step. Each guide leads to the free Brotherhood and the BraveHeart Intensive, so a search can become a relationship.
The Results
Measured the Day After Launch
We tested the old Wix site and the live new site side by side on 11/06/2026, using Google Lighthouse with simulated mobile speeds. Each page ran at least three times, and these are the median results. They include a round of speed tuning after launch: we moved the fonts onto BraveHeart’s own site, sized the home page photo for phones and held back images further down the page. The new site’s numbers were taken with the guides and web chat live.
- Home page on mobile: 9.3 seconds to 2.0. That’s how long the main content takes to appear, 79% faster. All three pages we tested now come in under Google’s 2.5-second mark for “good.”
- Intensive page on mobile: 9.1 seconds to 2.0. That’s 78% faster on the page that matters most for applications.
- Mobile performance scores: 74 to 99 on the home page, 73 to 99 on the Intensive page and 87 to 98 on the About page.
- 186 file requests down to 40 on the home page. JavaScript dropped 74%, from 745 KB to 197 KB.
- Mobile page weight down 53%, from 1,784 KB to 836 KB on the home page.
- Online giving, live for the first time.
The Honest Picture
What the Numbers Don’t Say Yet
We launched before we ran a formal baseline. The old site was still running on Wix’s servers after the move, so we tested it there. It no longer had Cloudflare in front of it, which may have shifted its timing slightly.
The web chat has a cost. It adds 23 file requests and about 230 KB to the home page, and most of the 197 KB of JavaScript there is the chat. In side-by-side tests it didn’t change the home page’s score or how fast its main content appeared, because it loads after that content. We think a way to reach out is worth the extra files. Without the chat, the home page makes 17 requests.
Mobile is where the difference shows up. Desktop was already fast on Wix, and scores there moved only a little, from 95 to 100 on the home page. Lighthouse’s SEO score was already 100 on the home and Intensive pages, so we aren’t claiming a jump there. The search work was in what that score doesn’t check: real titles and descriptions, no more demo content, and pages written for what men actually search.
The guides are new, and search rankings take months. Broad terms like “men’s coaching” will be slower to move than specific questions, so we’re not promising positions.
These are lab results from one location, not real-visitor data. This goes up days after launch, so there’s no traffic, ranking, application or giving data to report yet. We’ll add those results when there’s something real to show.
