23/07/2026
A few days ago, I was grabbing a flat white with Sarah, almost a year after we started working with her. As we reviewed the year, we got to talking about that first conversation.
Now, Sarah runs a bloody brilliant consulting business. She really knows her stuff, her clients think she’s top-notch, and on paper, the business was doing great. But the second I asked how her website was going, her shoulders slumping told me everything. She let out a massive sigh and set her mug down.
"Can I tell you a dirty secret?" she said. "My website is driving me up the wall."
I had to laugh a bit, to be honest. I’ve heard this exact story a hundred times, so I told her to spill the beans.
Turns out, about three years ago, Sarah fell for one of those flashy TV ads for a DIY site builder. You know the ones, some happy founder sips an oat milk latte, clicks three buttons, and suddenly they’re running a global empire. She figured it’d be easy as, so she decided to knock it together over a Sunday afternoon and save a few bucks.
That single Sunday turned into a three-year headache.
She ended up sinking over 10 hours into just trying to get a button to line up with a text box. Every time she got the desktop view looking sweet, the mobile version looked like a dog’s breakfast. The breaking point came at 2:00 AM on a Tuesday, staring at a busted contact form, when it finally clicked: she was supposed to be running a business, not pulling all-nighters playing amateur web designer. What was she doing, having already wasted over 60 hours on this?
To make matters worse, the site was completely invisible on Google. Total radio silence. When she messaged their support team asking why nobody could find her, they pointed to a tiny box on the screen and told her she could edit her page title. Meanwhile, her site was buried on Page 8. She felt like she was driving a shiny new ute with the bonnet welded shut.
The final straw came when she wanted to set up a custom client portal with dynamic pricing. The builder’s app store wanted an extra $150 a month for some clunky plugin that didn't even match her branding. She realized she was paying a subscription every month just to be trapped in a box.
That’s when she threw her hands up and asked if we could sort it out.
She was a bit nervous at first, mind you. She worried that moving away from a site builder would mean getting stuck with some boring corporate template, or that she’d break the whole page every time she tried to change a sentence.
We told her not to worry, she wouldn't lose any of the visual flair, and she’d finally have a site that actually brought in paying work. She could use the content management system, and even if she broke something, we had a backup of her site no more than 24 hours old. She could call and one of the team could screen share and help her.
We shifted her whole setup over to WordPress, rebuilt the design, and sorted out the engine room properly. We stripped out all the messy code in the background, got her load speeds flying, proper meta tags, descriptions, and snippets; even the schema was done. Once the site was live, we set up her SEO team to get her site ranking for the customers she wanted. set up proper technical SEO. We gave her smooth scroll animations and a custom look tailored to her brand, loading in just over a second flat. Plus, we built her client portal straight into the backend, job done, no extra monthly app taxes required.
Within 120 days, she was ranking on Google for keywords that her ideal client was looking for. One thing to remember is that this is not a short-term fix; good design, good SEO it all takes time. Sarah is now getting 6 to 8 solid leads a month. Not massive numbers, but she can turn 90% of them into clients. So plenty of new work coming in, and she now has a PA and another Consultant working with her, with designs on more consultants.
Look, DIY builders are fine if you just want a basic digital business card to show your mum. But if you’re ready to stop playing web designer at 2:00 AM and actually get your time back, you need something built properly on WordPress.
If you’re stuck in the same boat as Sarah, give us a shout and let’s get it sorted. Drop me a DM here or join our mailing list
