From a dead website to PageSpeed 100: a car repair shop and dealer in Solferino, with an AI photo studio

When Z-Garage got in touch, their website no longer existed. The previous provider had switched it off and walked away: no logins, no files, just a parked domain. For a workshop that lives on local customers, disappearing from Google meant losing calls from people looking for a mechanic near home, and from holidaymakers on the lake with a warning light on and nobody to call.

There were four challenges: recover the z-garage.it domain and start over without losing the identity customers already recognised; get found both by people living in the Alto Mantovano area and by tourists on southern Lake Garda, who speak other languages and rarely phone; give room to the newly launched used-car sales without the section ever looking empty; and let the owner publish a car from their phone, photos included, without going through me every time.

On top of that, the owner is not technical and has little time, and wanted to see finished, working things, not drafts to comment on.

First I recovered the z-garage.it domain and rebuilt the site from scratch. I kept the colours customers already associated with the workshop, black, yellow and light grey, and redid everything else: structure, copy, images and page hierarchy.

The site is built with Astro on Cloudflare Workers. Service pages are pre-rendered and open instantly; car listings are generated from the database on each request, with edge caching, so a car added from the admin panel is online immediately with no rebuild. The result is a PageSpeed score of 100 on both mobile and desktop.

Visually I focused on a few recognisable elements: the large outlined Z-GARAGE lettering scrolling across the hero, a tyre-tread texture on the dividers, and a sticky Call and WhatsApp bar always under the thumb on mobile. I replaced the old stock photos with real photos of the building; the few AI-generated images show only generic details, never a workshop or staff that don't exist.

Features delivered:

• Website in 5 languages – Italian, English, German, Russian and Albanian, with hreflang on every page. The browser-language redirect fires only on the home page and only on the first visit, so Google indexes every version.
• Custom car admin panel – built for the phone: dropdowns for make, model, fuel and gearbox, photos uploaded from the camera roll, Available, Reserved and Sold statuses. The number-plate field is ready for automatic vehicle data lookup.
• Export for Subito – Subito, Italy's main classifieds site, has no public API, so every listing downloads as a ZIP with photos and copy ready to upload.
• AI photo studio – an app installable on iPhone that takes up to 15 photos per car, recognises interiors, exteriors and details on its own, replaces the background with an outdoor scene or a showroom, adds the workshop logo and brings everything to the same 4:3 format, extending the background when the shot is vertical. For interiors, only the view through the windows changes.
• Automatic plate cover – the AI finds the four corners of the number plate and the workshop's graphic is applied in perspective. If the plate isn't found, four taps place it by hand.
• Photo-by-photo review – before and after comparison, single-image regeneration, export as ZIP or direct sharing from the phone. The AI key is encrypted and files are deleted after 48 hours.
• Short contact form – name, phone, service or plate, message. Requests arrive by email and are stored: it's designed for people writing out of hours or from abroad.