--- description: Auntie Snorkel's website runs their Maui rental and activity business. An unresponsive agency held the keys. We moved everything onto systems the owners control without losing one order. title: "Auntie Snorkel Case Study: A Maui Website Back in the Owners' Hands | KGP" image: https://kukuigrowth.com/hubfs/auntie-snorkel-og.webp --- Welcome to the new site! PH[808-867-1200](tel:+18088671200) [![Kukui Growth Partners](https://kukuigrowth.com/hubfs/raw_assets/public/kgp-theme/images/logo-lockup.png)](https://kukuigrowth.com/?hsLang=en) [What We Do](https://kukuigrowth.com/what-we-do?hsLang=en) [Our Work](https://kukuigrowth.com/work?hsLang=en) [How We Work](https://kukuigrowth.com/how-we-work?hsLang=en) [About Us](https://kukuigrowth.com/about?hsLang=en) [Start a conversation](https://kukuigrowth.com/start?hsLang=en) [← All work](https://kukuigrowth.com/work?hsLang=en) Ownership Auntie Snorkel · Beach gear rentals and activities · Kihei and Lahaina, Maui # Their website runs the business. Now they own every piece of it. Auntie Snorkel’s online store takes the bookings, the orders and the customer emails, and an unresponsive agency held the keys to all of it. We rebuilt every piece on systems the owners control and didn’t lose a single order. ![Mark Noble of Auntie Snorkel on a stand-up paddleboard](https://kukuigrowth.com/hubfs/Mark-Standing-SUP-3-1.jpg) Client Auntie Snorkel Engagement Website & systems ownership Orders lost 0 Email platform savings $8,300 / yr The business When the website has a bad day, Auntie Snorkel has a bad day. Visitors book gear and tours online, often before they’ve landed on Maui, and the shop team works the orders that come in. Every booking, every waiver, every “thanks for your order, here’s how to find us” email runs through the site. Owners Mark and Gwen Noble run shops in Kihei and Lahaina. The site sees roughly 15,000 visits a month and holds more than 40,000 orders, more than 50,000 completed bookings and about 6,800 customer accounts since 2018. The challenge Our relationship started with their advertising. As we got closer to the website the ads were sending people to, a bigger problem came into view: the agency that controlled the site had stopped responding. The hosting, the domain’s settings, the system that sent customer confirmation emails and most of the paid software running the store all sat in accounts held on the agency’s side, not the business’s. Requests went unanswered, and every week it stayed that way cost Auntie Snorkel money and put the business at greater risk. That’s a dangerous place for any business to be, and a more common one than owners realize. And it wasn’t hypothetical. When we started capturing the site, the store’s back office locked up and staff couldn’t process orders. The agency restored access, then restricted it further. Weeks later the old server’s caching started failing, taking the site down two nights in a row, and the hosting company wouldn’t act for the business without the agency’s sign-off. We stabilized it ourselves from the one login we had, and kept it running until the move. The goal was simple to say and careful to do: **put every piece of the website in the owners’ hands, without losing an order, a booking, a customer record or a single spot in Google.** Our approach **Care over speed.** This is a business that takes bookings around the clock, so we treated every step as if it could cost them a customer, because it could. - **Write everything down first.** Before moving anything, we built a complete map of the site: every page, every product, every form, every redirect, every email the site sends. That map became the checklist we tested against. - **Rehearse the risky parts.** The riskiest single step was upgrading the booking system that holds every reservation. We ran it first on a throwaway copy with all 48,391 bookings in it, confirmed every one came through, and only then did it for real. - **Check before deleting.** A database cleanup flagged what looked like 268,000 spam comments. On inspection they were about 271,000 real order notes, the store’s history. We kept every one and removed only what was truly junk: 11,903 abandoned shopping carts. - **Move in two steps.** First we moved control of the domain onto the business’s own account, with nothing changing for customers. Weeks later we moved the website itself. All that groundwork made the final switch a non-event for customers. - **Always keep a way back.** Multiple independent backups, and the old site left fully intact as a safety net until we were sure. - **Keep the owners in the loop, not in the weeds.** Mark got short updates every Friday (this week, next week, anything we need from you) and plain-language walkthroughs before the big moments. Most weeks, “anything we need from you” was “nothing, we’ve got it.” How we work together - **Gabe leads the work.** The KGP team does the building, the testing and the fixing. Mark’s part is limited to the things only an owner can do, like approving a decision or signing in to an account that’s in their name. - **Short, regular updates.** A Friday recap: what moved this week, what’s next, and whether anything’s needed from them. A monthly sync. A quick message when a real decision comes up, with a recommendation attached. - **Plain-language documents.** A walkthrough before each big step, a search report written for a business owner, a staff login guide and a living map of every account and who owns it. - **They own it.** Every account is in the business’s name. Our job is to keep making the system better, not to be the only ones who can touch it. The work Here’s what we did, piece by piece: 01 A new home for the website, owned by the business. We rebuilt the full website on [Convesio](https://www.convesio.com?fpr=u3os3u), managed WordPress hosting built for online stores, in an account in the business’s name. It scales up on busy days, runs on a fast global network and takes frequent automatic backups. Along the way we brought the store’s software fully up to date, one piece at a time, testing a real checkout after every change. We also recovered 836 product and page images that hadn’t come across in the original backup, so the new site was complete down to the last photo. 02 The domain, back under their control. The domain name is the most important thing a business owns online. It sits above the website and the email. We moved its settings into the business’s own account, rebuilt every record as an exact match so nothing changed for customers or staff, and made sure every account connected to it belongs to the business. 03 Go-live without customers noticing. Months of mapping, rebuilding and testing came down to one overnight go-live, Hawaii time, when bookings are close to zero. Before anyone said “go,” we ran a formal sign-off: a full checkout, a full booking, the liability waiver, the confirmation emails. All passed. During the switch we updated about 229,000 internal links and references so every page pointed to the live address, then placed a real test booking on the live site to confirm customers could book and get their email. Customers never saw a closed sign. 04 Every Google ranking protected. For a business that lives on being found online, rankings are revenue. We compared the old and new sites page by page across everything search engines look at: addresses, titles, descriptions, redirects, the sitemap. All 380 indexed pages and all 105 redirects carried over. Where the live site had changed after the backup was taken, such as updated product copy and prices, we brought the new site in line. After the move, Google Search Console was reading 383 pages with zero errors. 05 Customer emails on the business’s own account. Order and booking confirmations used to send through an account the agency controlled and the business couldn’t get into. We set up a new, business-owned sending service, verified it on their domain so emails pass the checks inboxes use to catch spoofing, and confirmed confirmations arriving in about three seconds. 06 The software licenses in their name, and a map of who owns what. The store runs on 12 paid software add-ons: the booking engine, the forms and waiver tool, SEO, performance and more. We relicensed every one under the business’s own accounts. Where there was a choice between full coverage and saving a few dollars, we chose full coverage, so nothing the store relies on can quietly lapse. Then we wrote it all down in plain language: every system the website depends on, who owns the account, who pays for it and how to get in. The point of the document is in one of its section titles: *Running everything without KGP.* The business holds the domain, the Google Workspace admin and the password vault, which together mean they can take over any account at any time. 07 Staff sign in with Google, and see only what they need. With two shops and a growing team, shared logins don’t scale. Staff now sign in to the website with their Auntie Snorkel Google account. Each person’s access follows their role: owners have full control, operations handles content and orders, store managers run the day-to-day store, and front-line staff can process orders and bookings without seeing revenue reports. When someone leaves the team, removing their Google account removes their website access too. 08 An email list platform that fits how they actually send. The newsletter platform was billing on every contact stored, about 66,000 of them, for a list mailed roughly once a month. We moved it to a platform that bills on emails sent instead: 64,717 contacts carried over with every unsubscribe honored first, 17 customer emails rebuilt, and every test landing in the inbox. Our audit also caught that the email telling new customers how to find the shop, and the thank-you email waiver signers get, were still running on the old platform, so we rebuilt and verified both before switching anything off. The newsletter sign-up form on the site moved too. The old bill has stopped. The new plan costs about 90% less: from roughly $9,100 a year to about $830, **saving Auntie Snorkel about $8,300 every year.** Results ## Every piece in the owners’ hands, with nothing lost. ✓ Zero data lost. Every order, booking and customer record came through the move intact. The store’s history now spans more than 40,000 orders, more than 50,000 completed bookings and about 6,800 customer accounts. ✓ A go-live customers didn’t notice. Overnight, with no customer impact observed and a safety net in place the whole time. ✓ Search visibility preserved. All 380 indexed pages and 105 redirects verified; 383 pages registered in Google Search Console with zero errors after the move. ✓ Full ownership. Hosting, domain, customer email and all 12 paid software licenses now sit in accounts the business controls. ✓ Store software fully current. The booking system’s upgrade was rehearsed against every one of its 48,391 bookings before going live. ✓ Staff access that scales. Google sign-in with four role levels, live across the team. ✓ About $8,300 a year saved on email. From roughly $9,100 a year to about $830 on the email list platform, with the old bill stopped. ✓ Orders up 55%. In the first full quarter after the move (July to September 2026 vs. the same months in 2025, from the store’s own records). ✓ Issues caught before customers feel them. Since go-live we’ve stayed on as the team behind the site: a hidden store setting (one that predated the move) that let some tour orders skip the staff’s to-do list, traced, proven with a controlled test and fixed across the whole catalog; booking-calendar arrows a software update made invisible, fixed the same day. “ Gabe and the team at Kukui Growth Partners have been phenomenal! They have restored our control over our website and provided us with insights and solutions that have resulted in a game changing increase in our sales. Gabe is a rare find. He is an expert, a professional and incredibly knowledgeable in all areas of online marketing, and website development. He is patient and a great communicator. We have reset our expectations of what we can accomplish thanks to Kukui Growth Partners. Mark Noble · Owner, Auntie Snorkel The bigger point Auntie Snorkel came to us for ads. The most important work turned out to be underneath: making sure the business owns the systems its revenue runs on, and that those systems are cared for by someone who knows them well. If you’re not sure who holds the keys to your website, your domain or your email list, that’s worth finding out before you need them. ![](https://kukuigrowth.com/hubfs/raw_assets/public/kgp-theme/images/tree-coral.png) ## Do you know who owns your website? Tell us what’s going on. We’ll tell you straight whether we can help. 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