Willerby is the UK's largest holiday home manufacturer. Its website exists to generate enquiries, not sales, and it needed to leave an unsupported headless platform without losing a lead or a ranking on the way.
Willerby's site ran on Strapi 4 with a separate front end, built and hosted by its marketing agency, which had since stepped back from development. Strapi 4 was reaching end of life, nobody in the business could change the site without a developer, and the budget had to be found mid-year with investor approval. The board wanted a fixed price, a fixed date, and a platform their own marketing team could run.
We began by giving Willerby three honest routes: upgrade to Strapi 5, rebuild on WordPress, or keep the front end and swap the CMS beneath it. We ranked the upgrade first on cost and risk and said so in writing. The board chose the rebuild for the control it gave their team, and we scoped it component by component at a fixed price.
The build ran breadth first: each component finished and signed off once, then rolled out across the estate. We migrated every page ourselves, including the full holiday home range and a park finder covering around 800 locations, so Willerby's team re-keyed nothing. The site was rebuilt to its existing URL structure to keep redirects to a minimum, with the client's SEO agency checking parity on staging and again after launch. HubSpot forms were re-integrated against existing consent fields so lead data kept flowing into the same pipeline, and Cookiebot gave the site a proper consent layer for the first time. The logged-in Owners Club and Trade areas were deliberately held behind a maintenance page at launch and delivered through the support retainer in the months that followed. That decision is what let the date hold.
The site went live on 30 April 2026, the date fixed five weeks earlier, at the agreed price. Organic visibility held through the move. Two subscriptions, the Cloudinary media CDN and the Canto asset manager, came out of the stack, saving around £13,700 a year.
Before signing, Willerby's chairman and investors reviewed our delivery record and described it as better than they had seen in the sector. The project handed into managed hosting and a monthly support retainer, renewed and expanded for the client's next financial year.
