Case study: WordPress rebuild for e-learning company

The brief

Originally introduced to Larmer Brown by SEO consultant Shauni Burt for some one-off technical SEO improvements to their WordPress site, we completed a thorough scoping and auditing process to assess what needed to be done to bring the existing Larmer Brown website up to modern standards.

Part of our stage one recommendations was to look at upgrading their existing pagebuilder-heavy, template-based site to utilise a newer version which contained security and usability fixes, with an alternative option being a bespoke Gutenberg-compatible theme build. These suggestions were shelved due to a limited budget for the first round of work.

We were subsequently contacted by Larmer Brown who, due to a recently completed brand refresh, requested we proceeded with a completely bespoke rebuild based upon an updated and modern refreshed look and feel, whilst keeping the simplicity and ease of use of the WordPress content management system.

What we did

With the go ahead to start afresh, we virtually rebuilt Larmer Brown from the ground up.

With the existing design only refreshed rather than completely redone we were able to forgo a design phase in order to keep costs down, while still freshening up the homepage and modernising the website’s look and feel.

We used the Gutenberg block editor to provide a lightweight yet intuitive interface through which to manage the site content, which meant that upon handover of the site, Larmer Brown were able to hit the ground running empowered to update and create content for themselves.

Challenges

Although rebuilding the theme was a quick process for us, the pagebuilder mark-up injected into the existing pages meant we had to strip out much of the content and completely re-add it to the site. This was a time consuming process and meant re-styling sections that would have ordinarily transferred between themes.

We worked with the client to adjust deadlines to accommodate the necessary changes as the project progressed.

Deliverables

• Fully bespoke WordPress theme developed based on the client’s existing site, with performance and search engine optimisation in mind
• Theme build Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA compliant at handover
• Setup tailored to client’s own hosting provider
• Post-live redirects created to minimise rebuild risk on existing search engine rankings
• Extensive improvements across the site, reduction of code overhead with refactoring, more consistent look and feel
• Bespoke, tailored performance optimisations to third party plugins and integrations to improve Core Web Vital scores and user experience