Case study: complex WordPress replatform

The brief

Beachlets approached us with an existing 15 year old website built on a proprietary content management system. They were keen to refresh and modernise their design, improve the user experience and performance on mobile, upgrade the platform, as well as streamline the backend editing experience.

The existing website had a strong SEO presence which was crucial to the site’s continued success, so needed full migration management and guaranteed URL matching to minimise any loss to existing search engine rankings.

Challenges

Each property on the Beachlets site needed an extensive amount of data stored against it to aid in effective filtering of properties to deliver the best user experience to the Beachlets customer. Ultimately Better implemented custom meta fields and taxonomies to store feature-rich attributes, allowing us to rebuild the bespoke filtering system and reflect that data across a grid listing and custom map display.

The many and complex filter options, each generating specific URLs in a set order, meant that the existing Beachlets website had a sitemap of over 25,000 unique URLs indexed in Google. Reintegrating this functionality to “exact match” the existing URLs to our new custom post types and taxonomies in WordPress involved writing a series of complex regular expressions to feed data into WordPress in a way that it would expect.

What we did

Ultimately Better implemented a full WordPress rebuild with extensive bespoke plugin and theme development.

A custom WordPress plugin was developed to handle the storage and display of property listings and integrated filters, including allocation of filter attributes, location data, special offers, rental conditions, and more.

Role-based dashboard permissions were implemented to ensure data entry users could not access or tamper with important site settings, and a moderation flow was implemented to ensure all properties where manually checked for accuracy before being published live on the site.

We used our plugin to extend the features of The SEO Framework, powering generation of appropriate meta tags and automated allocation of noindex tags to low usage filter combinations to ensure thin content pages weren’t indexed unnecessarily.

We paired our custom property management plugin with a performant, tailored WordPress theme that natively integrates with the WordPress Gutenberg editor; this achieved a performance score of 99 at launch when tested with Google PageSpeed Insights tool.

By rebuilding the Beachlets website on WordPress, we were able to create a fast, search-optimised, and user-friendly platform that increased website traffic by 20% and conversions by 40%.

The new solution provides a scalable foundation for future growth while delivering immediate gains in performance, technical SEO, and ease of management.

Deliverables

• Bespoke WordPress plugin to manage properties and associated data
• Performant, accessible custom WordPress theme built from provided design
• Site setup tailored to client’s own hosting provider
• Ongoing WordPress care package & development support
• Technical SEO advice and implementation
• Reintegration with Google Tag Manager and Search Console as standard