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A tea exporter’s website that buyers actually use

A family-run Ceylon tea exporter had a website buyers in Hamburg and Osaka gave up on before it loaded. We rebuilt it to load in about a second, speak four languages, work for everyone, and answer the questions buyers and AI assistants ask.

Where they started

A beautiful site nobody waited for

The exporter sells single-estate teas from the hills around Kandy to importers and specialty shops abroad. Their old website was a heavy theme with a full-screen video, a slider and a dozen plugins. On a buyer’s phone it took more than nine seconds to show anything. Research on how long people will wait for a page puts the limit at a couple of seconds1; most buyers simply left.

The ones who stayed found an English-only site, a catalogue in a downloadable PDF, and a contact form that collected more spam than orders. When a buyer in Germany asked an assistant for Ceylon tea exporters that ship to Europe, the company never came up. There was nothing on the site an assistant could read and quote.

Client
Ceylon tea exporter, Kandy (name withheld)
Buyers
Importers in Europe, Japan and the Gulf
Languages
English, German, Japanese, Arabic
Timeline
9 weeks, launch to first export order
Fresh tea leaves spread on withering troughs inside a tea factory

01 One site, four languages

Speaking the buyer’s language

Every page exists in English, German, Japanese and Arabic, written for that market rather than machine-translated, with Arabic laid out right to left. Each version tells search engines which language and country it serves, so a buyer in Osaka lands on the Japanese page2.

The catalogue moved out of the PDF and into real pages: every grade with its estate, elevation, leaf style, tasting notes, packing options and minimum order. Try the switcher.

estate-tea.example/en/

Single estate · Kandy

Ceylon tea from one estate, straight from the hills of Kandy.

Request a sample
BOPFMid grownOP1High grownSilver tipsHand rolled

Speed

From nine seconds
to about one

We rebuilt the site as plain, server-rendered pages with no slider, no autoplaying video and almost no JavaScript. Images are sized for each screen and compressed; fonts load without blocking text. The result passes Google’s Core Web Vitals, the three measures Google uses for real-world page experience: how fast the main content appears, how quickly the page responds, and whether the layout jumps around3.

Speed isn’t vanity. A study for Google found that shaving just a tenth of a second off mobile load times measurably increased conversions and engagement4.

Largest Contentful Paint good under 2.5 s

Before 9.1 sAfter 1.2 s

Interaction to Next Paint good under 200 ms

Before 610 msAfter 80 ms

Cumulative Layout Shift good under 0.1

Before 0.32After 0.01

Built for everyone, and for assistants

Readable by people
and by machines

  1. 01

    Accessible by design

    The site is built to WCAG 2.2 level AA, the W3C’s standard for accessible web content5: real headings, readable contrast, full keyboard use and text alternatives for every image. Around one in six people worldwide lives with a significant disability6, and buyers are no exception.

  2. 02

    Facts an assistant can quote

    Grades, estates, certifications, minimum orders and shipping terms live in plain text on their own pages, which is what search engines and AI assistants read7. The company’s details are marked up so its profiles connect8.

  3. 03

    Enquiries, not spam

    One short enquiry form per grade, with an invisible spam check instead of a puzzle. Each enquiry arrives tagged with the grade, the buyer’s country and the language they browsed in.

  4. 04

    Easy for the team

    The sales team updates prices, stock seasons and new grades in a simple editor. Translations are flagged when the English changes, so no language falls behind.

Results

Six months after launch

  • 3.4×

    More export enquiries

    Qualified enquiries from importers and specialty shops, compared with the six months before.

  • 41%

    Outside English

    Of all enquiries came through the German, Japanese and Arabic pages.

  • −63%

    Bounce rate

    Fewer visitors leaving after one page, once pages loaded before they gave up.

  • 0

    Spam enquiries

    Reaching the sales inbox, down from dozens a week.

References

The research behind it

Every method on this page builds on published research, standards or official documentation. Numbers in the text point here.

  1. Nah, F. F.-H. (2004). A study on tolerable waiting time: How long are Web users willing to wait? Behaviour & Information Technology, 23(3), 153–163. doi.org/10.1080/01449290410001669914
  2. Google Search Central. Tell Google about localized versions of your page. Google for Developers documentation. developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/international/localized-versions
  3. Google. Web Vitals. web.dev. web.dev/articles/vitals
  4. Deloitte. (2020). Milliseconds make millions. Commissioned by Google. www.deloitte.com/ie/en/services/consulting/research/milliseconds-make-millions.html
  5. W3C. (2023, updated 2024). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. W3C Recommendation. www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/
  6. World Health Organization. (2022). Global report on health equity for persons with disabilities. www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240063600
  7. Google Search Central. Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content. Google for Developers documentation. developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content
  8. Google Search Central. General structured data guidelines. Google for Developers documentation. developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/sd-policies

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