Cheadle Skip Hire

1Read this before you pitch

This is a very different situation from a typical small-business website, and getting the framing right is most of the job.

The pitch is that the good stuff is being smothered. A customer on a phone has to pull down 24 MB before they see anything, then meets a booking form squeezed into a fixed 502-pixel box — and the company has no working analytics to see how many give up.

Who you are dealing with

• Cheadle Skip Hire Ltd, company number 05353619, VAT 824171056.
• Unit 24, Adswood Rd Industrial Estate, Adswood, Stockport, Cheshire, SK3 8LF.
• Director who signs the accounts: Mrs L Bradshaw.
• Site describes "nearly 30 years" serving South Manchester, own fleet from skip trucks to grab wagons, 90% of waste recycled.
• Built on WordPress with a custom theme called cheshire-skips. Booking runs on WasteLogics (customer-facing brand MyYard).

2The 24 MB homepage

This is the headline finding and it is not a rounding error.

Three photographs alone account for 16.1 MB:

Those three skip photos are being downloaded at nearly 6 MB each to be displayed at the size of a business card.

Why this matters commercially, in their words not ours: skip hire is an urgent, local, overwhelmingly mobile search. Somebody standing in a half-cleared garage on 4G is not waiting 24 MB. They are tapping the next result.

3The booking system — they did the hard part

The /hire/ page contains a genuinely good five-step checkout: postcode → price and availability → delivery and billing address → preview and confirm → pay. It handles company name, contact details, delivery and collection dates with AM/PM slots, "how did you hear about us", and order notes. It takes card payment. This is real infrastructure and it works.

Then it is embedded like this:

Step one — a single postcode box — fits fine. The risk is steps three to five, where the form asks for company name, full name, telephone, email, two dates and order notes. That is a lot of form for a 502-pixel window with scrolling switched off.

There is also a tracking consequence, and it is the expensive one. Because checkout lives in an iframe on a third-party domain, the URL never changes as the customer moves through the five steps. Nothing can see where people drop off, and no advertising platform can be told what a completed booking looks like. Which leads directly to the next point.

4They cannot measure any of it

In plain terms: for roughly three years, nobody has been able to see how many people visit, which pages they land on, which areas they come from, or how many start a booking and give up. The analytics code is still sitting there looking reassuring in the source, and collecting nothing.

This is also why nobody has noticed the 24 MB homepage. There is no data showing the bounce.

• No GA4 — no traffic data at all since mid-2023
• No Meta Pixel — cannot run or retarget Facebook and Instagram ads properly
• No conversion tracking on the booking flow — cannot calculate cost per booking on any paid channel

5SEO and trust gaps

Missing basics

• No meta description on the homepage. Google is writing their search snippet for them. Also missing on the location pages we checked.
• No <h1> on the homepage. The single strongest on-page signal is simply absent.
• jQuery 1.11.1 — released 2014.

What's already right

• They do have JSON-LD structured data and Open Graph tags — better than most.
• Canonical tags are set.
• They have built location pages (Didsbury, Manchester, Stretford and more) — the right instinct for local search, and those pages do have proper H1s.
• A Trustindex widget is pulling in real Google reviews.

Worth a question, not an accusation

There is a WordPress plugin installed called site-helper-3f49dae5189c, loading 510 KB of JavaScript. The random hash in the folder name is unusual for a normal plugin. It may well be something their host installed legitimately, but it is worth asking who put it there. Their Google Maps API key is also exposed in the page source — that is normal for the Maps JavaScript API, but it should be domain-restricted in the Google Cloud console. Worth confirming it is.

6Mobile

• Header occupies 242 px of an 812 px phone screen.
• A further 100 px of empty white space sits between the header and the page heading.
• On the booking page, 46% of the screen is consumed before the form appears.
• No horizontal overflow — that part is fine.

7What their accounts say about pricing

From the filed accounts for the year ended 31 March 2025 — public information at Companies House, filed under the small companies regime. No profit and loss account was filed, so the figures below are from the balance sheet.

One caveat to keep you honest: because no P&L was filed, £286,937 is the movement in reserves, not stated profit. If dividends were paid, actual profit was higher still. Either way the direction is unambiguous.

8What to sell them, and for how much

Because they already own the hard infrastructure, there is a genuinely attractive first job here: a small, fast, obviously-worth-it fix that buys trust before anyone talks about a rebuild.

For reference, UK agencies typically charge £3,000–£8,000 for a build of this type and £150–£600/month for ongoing work. These numbers sit inside that range deliberately — competitive, not cheap. Given what the accounts show, going in low would be a mistake.

9The order to do it in

10About the concept

Everything in it is real. The prices, skip sizes, bin-bag equivalents, reviews, address, company number and VAT number were all taken from their own website on 16 August 2026. The reviews are quoted word for word. Nothing was invented.

Two points worth making when you show it:

• The photographs are theirs — the very same files, just compressed. That is the 19.11 MB → 814 KB test, running live in front of them.
• The booking page shows a faithful static reproduction of their WasteLogics widget, not a redesign of it. We wanted to embed the live one, but their frame-ancestors policy blocks every domain except cheadleskips.com — see section 3. What changed is the container around it: it sizes to the visitor's screen instead of a hard-coded 502 px, the five steps are shown up front, and the price list sits alongside.

Measured side by side on a 375 × 812 phone, ignoring the yellow mockup banner:

What else the two screens demonstrate:

• Postcode, skip size and date above the fold on the homepage — booking starts immediately
• All four prices visible without a click, with yards and bin-bag equivalents
• A compact 64 px header instead of 242 px, and no empty gap
• Credential slots in the footer, deliberately left marked "add number" — because they are blank on the live site too
• Real reviews, area pages for local search, WhatsApp, and a sticky call/book bar on mobile
• LocalBusiness + OfferCatalog schema with all four skip prices
• Lazy-loaded images, no horizontal overflow, tap targets at 42 px and above

Prepared by Web Express, 16 August 2026. This is an independent technical assessment of a publicly accessible website, alongside figures from accounts filed publicly at Companies House. It is not legal, financial or investment advice. Cheadle Skip Hire Ltd, WasteLogics, MyYard and Trustindex are named for identification only and have no involvement in this document.