The client
Little Rock Montessori School has been part of Little Rock since January 1966, when a group of parents organized to bring a Montessori education to the city. Today the school serves children from 22 months through third grade across two campuses: the original on North Rodney Parham Road, home since 1970, and LRMS South on Hinson Road, which opened in 2008. Families come for individual pacing, mixed-age classrooms and hands-on learning. A parent's first look at all of that is usually the website.
The challenge
The old site ran on WordPress with the Divi page builder. It worked, but it was built for a different era of the school and had started to work against the people using it:
- Heavy under the hood. The homepage alone carried 3,708 page-builder markup tags, and the site ran on 11 active plugins, each one another thing to keep updated and another way for the site to break.
- Two campuses, one phone number. Only the North campus number was listed anywhere on the site. A parent trying to reach LRMS South had to find the number somewhere else.
- A calendar nobody could keep up with. The events plugin held 67 published events, none of them upcoming. Keeping it current took more WordPress know-how than a school office has time for.
- No way to apply online. The only form on the site was a three-field contact box (name, email, message). Applying meant contacting the office first.
- No working analytics. There was no active tracking of any kind, so the school had no way to tell whether the site was producing tours and applications.
What we built
WebJIVE rebuilt the site from scratch on our fast, flat-file platform, designed around the two things a school website has to do: help a parent decide to visit, and let the office keep it current without calling a developer. The improvements:
For parents
- A homepage that answers the first question. A full-width photo of LRMS students, the headline "A Montessori education for ages 22 months through 3rd grade," and Schedule a Tour and Apply Now buttons above the fold.
- Tour and Apply are always one tap away. Sticky side tabs on desktop and a bottom bar on phones, on every page.
- Both campuses, properly. Separate addresses, the correct phone number for each campus, hours, and a map for each one on the contact page.
- An online Student Application. A new 25-field application form, plus a Forms hub that gathers the inquiry form, the application and the fee schedule in one place.
- Tuition and pickup times that are easy to scan. The fee schedule was rebuilt as clean tables, with every figure carried over exactly from the old site.
- The school's own photos. Real LRMS classroom and playground photography throughout, with no stock images, served in modern formats and sized for each screen.
- Recognition up front. The school's AY Magazine "Best Of" badges are displayed on the homepage instead of buried.
For the school office
- Edited with Jarvi. The site is built for the Jarvi AI Editor, so staff can update the calendar, fees or any page by describing the change in plain English. Jarvi shows a preview before anything goes live.
- A calendar they can actually maintain. The old events plugin is gone. The School Calendar is a simple page the office updates through Jarvi.
- Every inquiry in one place. Both forms save each submission to the school's own lead history and email it to the office. We imported all 455 inquiries from the old site, dating back to November 2020, so nothing was lost in the move.
- Notifications that land in the inbox. We updated the domain's email authentication so notifications sent by the website are authorized by the school's domain and signed, and land in the school's Microsoft 365 inbox.
- Tracking that shows what's working. Google Analytics 4 now records every Schedule a Tour, Apply, Forms and email click, plus every completed inquiry.
Under the hood
- No content database, no page builder, no plugins. Pages are plain, fast files. The homepage went from 3,708 builder tags to zero, and the HTML is about 21 KB. There is nothing to patch, and nothing that can break with the next plugin update.
- Every old link still works. All 110 addresses in the old site's sitemaps (27 pages, 67 event listings and a dozen media pages) still resolve, along with 13 links left over from the school's previous website. Parents' bookmarks keep working and search engines have nothing to re-learn.
- Structured data for both campuses. Each campus is described to search engines as its own school, with its own address and opening hours.
- Ready for AI search. The site publishes an
llms.txtfile that gives AI assistants a clean summary of the school, its programs and its campuses. - Spam protection that stays out of the way. reCAPTCHA protects both forms, and it only loads when a parent starts filling one in, so it never slows down the page.
The result, measured
The new site went live on September 25, 2026, replacing the WordPress build at lrmontessori.org. That same day we stood the retired WordPress site back up privately, on the same server with its own copy of the database and every plugin still active, and scored both versions with Google PageSpeed Insights: same four pages, same tool, median of three runs each.
| Page | Mobile score | Accessibility | Mobile LCP |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home | 63 → 99 | 72 → 96 | 2.4s → 1.8s |
| About | 91 → 99 | 69 → 96 | 2.3s → 1.7s |
| Tuition & Fees | 90 → 99 | 73 → 96 | 2.3s → 1.7s |
| Contact & Tours | 88 → 99 | 69 → 97 | 2.0s → 0.8s |
Mobile score is PageSpeed Performance out of 100. LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) is how long the main content takes to appear on a phone.
- Desktop: the old pages scored 83–96. All four now score 100.
- Nothing jumps while it loads. Layout shift was over Google's 0.1 "good" limit on every old page (0.11–0.19), so buttons moved under a parent's thumb. It is now below 0.04 everywhere.
- A lighter homepage. The old homepage downloaded about 3,800 KB and blocked the phone's main thread for 640 ms. The new one is about 790 KB with no blocking time, even though it leads with a full-width photo.
- Best Practices and SEO score 100 on every new page.
In fairness to the old site: its inner pages were already fairly quick on a phone (88–91). The homepage, where most parents start, is where it struggled. The new Contact page is heavier than the old one (about 1,220 KB against 330 KB), mostly the two embedded campus maps, and it still scores 99. Accessibility is 96–97 rather than 100; the one item Lighthouse still flags is color contrast on a few small text elements. We didn't compare SEO scores, because the test copy of the old site had to be hidden from Google while we measured it, and Lighthouse marks down any hidden page.
We did it to our own site first
WebJIVE moved its own 155-page website off WordPress before offering the same move to clients. Read what actually changed → Or see another rebuild: the Arkansas Zoological Foundation.
PageSpeed figures captured September 25, 2026 via the Google PageSpeed Insights API, median of three runs per page and per strategy, for both the live site and the privately restored WordPress site. The old homepage's mobile score varied from 62 to 81 across runs; the median was 63. Figures describing the old site's build (builder markup, plugins, events and forms) were recorded from the live WordPress site on September 23, 2026, before launch. See the live site at lrmontessori.org. Thinking about a rebuild of your own? Start with our website design services.
About Little Rock Montessori School
Little Rock Montessori School is operated by the Arkansas Montessori Society, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and has served Little Rock families since 1966. Its North campus is at 3704 N. Rodney Parham Road and LRMS South is at 12015 Hinson Road. Both are open weekdays from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. for children from 22 months through third grade. Learn more or schedule a tour at lrmontessori.org.