Case study: WordPress care & development support
Mill on the Brue – an outdoor activity centre set over 25 acres of Somerset countryside with over 40 fun activities.
Project Results
1
Average engagement time per user up >44% in peak season 2025
2
Increase in summer camp bookings for 2025 vs 2024
3
Total website sales up 10% in 2025 vs same period 2024
The brief
Mill on the Brue came to us with an established WordPress website wanting improvements to day to day content management, help with testing and rolling out WordPress updates, fixes for numerous ongoing issues with their bespoke booking system and a refresh of key pages.
Challenges
The Mill on the Brue website was built on a legacy pagebuilder that generated masses of bloated, unwieldy mark-up and was difficult for non-technical users to use, meaning pages were left out of date until a developer could help manage the process.
The summer camp booking system, a bespoke piece of development built upon WooCommerce, allowed users to book individual summer camps but was difficult to navigate and didn’t sense check certain data, inadvertently allowing parents to book camps without providing vital information.
What we did
Ultimately Better took over the hosting and maintenance of the Mill on the Brue website, immediately moving it to new WordPress-optimised hosting to help deal with the speed issues caused by the legacy pagebuilder.
Working closely with Mill on the Brue and marketing agency matm, we facilitated the creation of a design refresh for the home page and the online summer camp booking system. This refresh delivered a cleaner look and feel with defined calls to action, as well as an improved user experience and a more intuitive flow for summer camp customers making booking transport and purchasing merchandise feel more natural.
We rebuilt the new home page on the native WordPress Gutenberg editor, giving Mill on the Brue full control over future content & imagery changes, and continue to migrate further pages to Gutenberg on a phased page-by-page basis.
Deliverables
- Premium optimised WordPress hosting with SSL certificate based on Litespeed technologies integrated with native Litespeed caching
- Bespoke WooCommerce development
- Phased rebuild of theme to move away from bloated, legacy editor, to native Gutenberg editor
- Ongoing WordPress care package & development support
- Extensive improvements across the site, reduction of code overhead with refactoring, more consistent look and feel
Client feedback
We have been working with Ultimately Better for a couple of years. They are responsive to requests, easy to work with, honest, and manage to decipher the sometimes what we see as ‘the dark art of website and maintenance’ to the untrained eye. Through establishing monthly catch up meetings we have increased our inter company communication that is so important to a healthy working relationship.
Matt Rawlingson Plant
Finance and Development Director
Got a project?
If you’re ready to learn more about how Ultimately Better can help you with your WordPress website or WooCommerce development, get in touch and speak to one of the team today.