A regulated mortgage broker's lead engine, rebuilt off WordPress
Belle Maison's website is its lead engine — its whole job is turning visitors into booked consultations. The old site ran on WordPress and Elementor with around 24 plugins, carrying the usual cost, performance and security overhead plus structural SEO problems: orphaned, near-duplicate local pages and heavy brand-dependence. We rebuilt it from scratch on Astro and Vercel: every marketing, service, blog and local page is pre-rendered static HTML, with the booking form and lead-gated calculators hydrated as small Preact islands. The whole WordPress server surface collapses to a handful of serverless functions — chiefly one lead endpoint that validates a submission, relays it into the GoHighLevel CRM with full UTM passthrough, fires a server-side Meta Conversions API event and triggers email. Because mortgages are a regulated YMYL product, compliance is load-bearing: every line of visible copy is a potential financial promotion, so we enforce it in code — the locked repossession risk-warning has an automated drift-guard test that fails the build if anyone paraphrases it, and HL Partnership's full financial-promotion review was applied across the codebase. The rebuild is functionally complete on private staging, held noindexed behind a double fail-safe until regulatory sign-off and DNS cutover clear.
The brief
An FCA-regulated broker's revenue-critical site was trapped on a heavy ~24-plugin WordPress/Elementor stack, with orphaned near-duplicate local SEO pages and financial-promotion compliance that had to hold on every line of copy.
What we did
A from-scratch static-first rebuild on Astro + Vercel: 39 page routes, four tested mortgage calculators, 12 data-driven local town pages, a single serverless lead endpoint into the CRM with server-side conversion tracking, and FCA compliance enforced in code via a build-failing risk-warning drift-guard test.