Williams Lester Accountants — Squarespace to WordPress
A Cardiff accountancy practice stuck inside a closed website builder. We rebuilt it as a custom WordPress theme, kept the design they already liked, and handed back control of every word on the site.
A Design They Liked, On a Platform They Had Outgrown
Williams Lester had a Squarespace site that looked the part but fought them on everything else. Page markup was fixed by the template, so heading structure and structured data were not theirs to change. Anything beyond swapping text meant working around the builder rather than with it.
The brief was not a redesign. They wanted to keep the look their clients already recognised, and move it somewhere they could actually run it: edit any section, publish resources, and own the code underneath.
Template-Bound Markup
Closed builders decide your HTML. Heading order, schema and page structure are set by the template, which puts a ceiling on technical SEO work no amount of copywriting gets past.
No Ownership
Content, templates and forms all lived inside someone else's product. Moving later gets harder every year the site grows.
Same Site to Look At. Completely Different Underneath.
Faithful Static Capture First
Before touching WordPress we took a static copy of the live site and had it signed off as the reference. Every later decision was measured against it, so the rebuild had a fixed target instead of drifting into an accidental redesign.
Custom Theme, Every Region Editable
We built a classic PHP theme rather than a page builder, then backed each homepage section, service page and contact block with Carbon Fields. The client edits plain labelled fields in wp-admin. Nothing important is buried in a shortcode or locked in a plugin.
Repeatable Content Seeding
All content lives in version-controlled JSON and loads through an idempotent seeder, covering 21 content files and 11 migrated blog posts. Running it twice changes nothing, so staging and live can be rebuilt from the same source without hand-copying pages.
Gated Resources and a Hardened Form
A custom resource post type powers a download library: the visitor requests a guide, the file arrives by email as an attachment, and the lead reaches the practice at the same time. Contact and download forms share one anti-spam stack with four layers: signed token, honeypot, rate limiting and repeat-offender blocking.
AI Chat Assistant
An AI assistant sits on every page, answering routine questions about services, fees and appointments outside office hours and passing anything it cannot handle to the practice. Deployed and configured against the site's own content, so it answers from what Williams Lester actually publish.
A Site the Practice Runs Itself
Williams Lester now publish resources, edit any section and add posts without a developer in the loop. The markup, the schema and the hosting are theirs, so technical SEO work is a decision rather than a support ticket.
Because the build is a plain theme plus a seeder, there is no proprietary layer to unpick later. The practice can move host, hand the site to another developer, or keep extending it, without starting again.
Edit Anything, Break Nothing
Labelled fields for every section. No page builder to learn, and no way to accidentally dismantle a layout while changing a sentence.
Downloads That Capture Leads
Each guide request delivers the file to the visitor and the enquiry to the practice, turning a static PDF page into a working lead source.