Emily runs Move & Mend With Em, a sports massage, lymphatic drainage and personal training practice across Telford, Shrewsbury and Stafford, plus mobile visits. She is genuinely good at the work. Her website was not doing it justice. In her own words, it was “poor quality, doesn’t rank well, and isn’t good on mobile.”
What she came with
The old site was built on WordPress with the Elementor page builder, and it showed. The homepage was a single stock-style hero under a heavy sepia overlay, with low-contrast all-caps text and a row of washed-out photos below, one of which was a picture of her dog. The imagery was generic template art rather than photos of Emily or her treatments. There were only three real pages (Home, Services and Book) and no About page at all, a serious gap for a personal-brand therapy business built on trust.
Under the bonnet it was a typical Elementor stack: 99 network requests, 38 separate stylesheets, 40 JavaScript files and jQuery, a lot of weight for a small brochure site. The brand itself was worth keeping, though. Emily had a clear identity: a deep burgundy “MOVE / MEND with em” wordmark, a warm palette and a well-named set of “Reset” treatments. The raw material was good. The execution was letting it down.
The brief
Keep the brand, the copy and the real media, but massively lift the design, performance, mobile experience and search visibility, rebuilt to HDC’s engineering and design standards on a modern, fast, maintainable stack.
Our approach
- Keep the identity, lift the craft. We kept the burgundy-and-cream identity and the “Reset” treatment names, then rebuilt the execution to a premium standard with a proper design-token system, a real type scale, considered spacing and restrained motion.
- Commit to the colour, not the cliché. We put the burgundy to work as a confident brand colour on a clean white canvas, using warm cream only as an accent surface, deliberately avoiding the washed-out, low-contrast look of the old site.
- Fix the brand, honestly. The original logo set the word “MEND” in cream, which is invisible on white. We rebuilt the wordmark as adaptive type so it always meets contrast: burgundy and brass on light, cream and brass on the dark footer.
- Use the real work. We brought in Emily’s genuine photography, real treatments, her Maderotherapy tools, gym sessions and race-day shots, optimised it, and binned the template stock art and the dog photo.
- Build for search and AI. Proper per-page metadata, a full JSON-LD schema graph (local business, per-clinic geo, services, FAQs, reviews and author), a topic-authority Journal and clean internal linking.
What we built
A 21-page static site on Astro and Cloudflare Pages. The homepage leads with a real treatment photo, a confident type-led hero and a signature “Find your reset” treatment menu, the treatments presented as an editorial price list rather than a generic grid of cards. There is a dedicated About page (the missing trust engine), three genuinely distinct location pages with privacy-first maps, dedicated service pages, an honest Journal of advice articles and a proper Contact page. Cliniko booking is kept and embedded, a privacy-first enquiry form emails Emily directly, and Consent Mode v2 handles cookies so the maps and analytics only load once a visitor agrees.
The transformation, measured
We measured the homepage of the production build against the live WordPress site. Every figure below is measured, not estimated.
| Before (WordPress + Elementor) | After (Astro static) | |
|---|---|---|
| Network requests | 99 | 17 |
| Page weight | 1,568 KB | 579 KB |
| JavaScript | 40 files, 607 KB | 5 files, 63 KB |
| CSS files | 38 | 1 |
| jQuery | Yes | None |
| Pages of real content | 3 | 21 |
That is around 90% less JavaScript and 83% fewer requests, on a site that carries far more content than the one it replaced.
We have deliberately not claimed rankings, traffic or conversion figures here. The site is pre-launch, so there is no live search or analytics data yet. GA4 and Search Console go on at launch, and we will add those numbers once they are real.
What Emily said
“This site so far is brilliant.”
Same brand. Same content. A completely different website. If your site is holding your business back the way Emily’s was, tell us what you need and we will give you an honest view of what a rebuild would do for you.