From an outdated theme site to a fast, clear agency website built for leads.

Before

A course website for a company that had become an agency.

Before the rebuild, empowerszone.com was a WordPress site on the Bizix agency theme with a child theme, Elementor and Elementor Pro, Revolution Slider, Ultimate Member, WooCommerce and Contact Form 7. Its title still read like a training business, with Amazon FBA training and Walmart and eBay courses. That stack is common, and nothing about it was broken, but each plugin added its own scripts and styles to every page, and the site's message no longer matched how the company earned its money.

I started with a content audit. I went through every page of the live site, listed each claim and figure, and marked the ones that needed the company's confirmation before they could appear on the new site. Nothing on the new site is invented: where the old copy was inconsistent or could not be checked, the item was held back or flagged for the owner to confirm.

Structure

A page for every service and every way people search for it.

The new site has 45 pages, each written for one clear purpose. The structure follows how sellers actually look for help: by marketplace, by task, and by location.

The build

React for the design, static HTML for speed and search.

The site is a custom React and Vite application, but visitors and search engines never wait for JavaScript to see the content. At build time every route is rendered on the server and saved as its own HTML file, and React then takes over in the browser for the menus, animations and form. Crawlers, including AI search crawlers that do not run JavaScript, get the full text of every page.

The design uses GSAP for scroll animations, Lenis for smooth scrolling and a Three.js scene in the home page hero. The 3D scene loads lazily, after the page itself, so it never holds up the first paint. Images are served as WebP in several widths, so a phone downloads a phone-sized image. All copy, services, FAQs, reviews and blog posts live in data files, which means the content can change without touching a component.

Keeping the old traffic

Every old URL redirected, none left to break.

A rebuild that ignores the old URLs throws away the links and rankings the site has collected. I took every URL Google knew about from Search Console and mapped each one in the server's .htaccess file: a 301 redirect to the matching new page where one exists, and a 410 Gone for old pages that have no equivalent, so Google drops them cleanly instead of reporting errors. Blog posts were rebuilt at their original addresses, so they needed no redirect at all, and the old Yoast sitemaps now point to the new sitemap.

Unknown paths return a real 404 page with a 404 status, the www address redirects to the main domain, and hashed asset files are cached for a long time while the HTML stays fresh.

Leads and trust

A contact form on SubmitDock and reviews straight from Google.

The consultation form is the most important part of a lead-generation site. It validates each field in plain language as the visitor types, then sends the submission to SubmitDock, my free WordPress.org plugin for headless forms, running on a small WordPress install on a subdomain. Every enquiry is stored in WordPress and emailed to the team, so no lead is lost if an email fails.

Reviews matter just as much for an agency. A build script reads the company's Google Business Profile through the Places API before every deploy and on a daily schedule, so the rating, review count and testimonials on the site always match the live profile, and nobody has to copy reviews by hand.

SEO and launch

Search details on every page from day one.

Each page has its own title, description, canonical URL and Open Graph image, generated at build time. The structured data describes the company, its offices and opening hours, its leadership and the FAQs. The build also writes the sitemap, an llms.txt summary for AI assistants and IndexNow pings for Bing. Pushing to GitHub builds the site and uploads it to Hostinger over FTPS, so publishing a change takes one commit.