Enterprise redesign and rebuild.
Building a WordPress site that the marketing team can actually manage
Why did Pearn Kandola need a new website?
Pearn Kandola had relaunched their website only months before coming to us. It was already failing.
Pearn Kandola is one of the UK’s leading business psychology consultancies – a serious organisation working at the top end of leadership development, DEI consultancy and assessment. Their clients are large enterprises. The people they need to impress are HR Directors, L&D leaders and DEI decision-makers who know exactly what good looks like.
The previous agency had rebuilt the site in September 2023. Within months it was clear something was wrong. Organic traffic was declining despite ongoing work with two separate SEO agencies. The site had technical bugs, unreliable hosting and a theme built on Webpack that was so complex no developer wanted to own it. The internal team couldn’t update content without friction. The platform was a liability.
The brief was not to redesign the brand. The brand was fine. The brief was to rebuild the foundations properly – stable hosting, clean code, a CMS the team could actually use, and an SEO platform that would stop declining and start growing.
Issues with the existing site:
- Organic traffic in decline despite two SEO agency partnerships post-launch
- Theme built on Webpack – complex, fragile, and difficult for any developer to work on
- Technical bugs throughout with no clear developer ownership
- Hosting was unreliable and not managed by anyone with site-level accountability
- Content management was slow and frustrating for the internal team
- No accessibility features despite the site serving large enterprise HR and DEI audiences
- CRM and analytics integrations were unreliable or missing
Our approach
Project overview
A full rebuild of an established consultancy website on a clean, stable WordPress platform. Brand retained. Everything else rebuilt from scratch – theme, hosting, CMS, integrations, SEO foundations, accessibility and a 228-page content migration.
Discovery and audit
- Full technical audit of the existing site to identify the causes of declining organic performance
- Keyword research and competitor analysis to inform the new site structure
- Existing URL and sitemap audit to protect search equity during migration
- User journey review across key audience types – HR leaders, DEI decision-makers, large enterprise
Design and UX
- Existing brand identity retained – the problem was the build, not the design
- Key pages redesigned to improve hierarchy, clarity and conversion
- Accessibility built in from the start – contrast, text size and screen reader considerations throughout
- Navigation and internal linking rationalised to support multiple distinct audience journeys
WordPress build
Bespoke build on our own custom starter theme – no Webpack, no inherited complexity, no fragile dependencies. Purpose-built ACF content blocks replace the previous setup entirely. Default Gutenberg blocks disabled, so editors only ever work with layouts that are correctly styled and on-brand.
The result is a CMS the internal team can actually use without ringing a developer first.
Integrations and functionality
CRM integration, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Search Console all connected and working. WooCommerce installed and configured for the Society’s book sales with existing WorldPay payment gateway. Accessibility features built in throughout. Everything the previous site promised but did not deliver.
Got a similar problem?
If your site was rebuilt by someone else and it’s still not working – technically, commercially, or both – we should talk.
We’ll tell you honestly what we find and what we would do about it.
The results
228
Pages migrated from the old site with all existing search equity protected
97
Google PageSpeed score on mobile and desktop – replacing a site that could not achieve this
The previous website scored 45/100
Nada
Webpack dependencies, third-party theme frameworks or inherited technical complexity
The previous site was overly reliant on third-party code
100%
Of content manageable by the Pearn Kandola team without developer involvement
Previously, they needed to contact the developers for even small changes
Fixed
CRM, analytics and marketing tool integrations – all connected and working correctly at launch
The old site experienced connectivity issues which we resolved
Ready
SEO foundations rebuilt properly – the platform is now set up to grow, not decline
Rankings were significantly lower for the previous site than where they are post-rebuild
Technical details
WordPress theme
Built on our own bare-bones WordPress starter theme. No inherited styles, no third-party framework dependencies, no bloat. Before any design work goes in, we run the blank theme through Google PageSpeed Insights and aim for 100 out of 100 on both mobile and desktop. That discipline is what makes the performance scores possible – and what the previous build, for all its complexity, could never achieve.
Plugins
We keep third-party plugins to a minimum. This site uses ACF-powered content blocks edited in the Gutenberg editor. The default WordPress block library was disabled entirely – editors can only use the purpose-built blocks we created, which means every page is built consistently and on-brand regardless of who published it.
Hosting
Moved from unreliable third-party hosting to Toast managed WordPress hosting – monitored by us, with daily backups, uptime alerts and performance checks built in. The previous site had no single point of accountability for server performance. This one does.
Integrations
Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google Tag Manager all connected correctly. CRM integration configured. WooCommerce installed for book sales with WorldPay payment gateway. Accessibility features – contrast controls, text sizing, screen reader compatibility – built in throughout rather than bolted on.
Why the problem was never really about SEO.
Pearn Kandola had worked with two SEO agencies after launch. Organic traffic kept declining. That is not an SEO problem. That is a foundations problem.
You cannot do effective SEO on a site that is technically broken. You can write all the meta descriptions you like, but if the theme is built on an overcomplicated Webpack setup that makes the site slow and fragile, if the hosting is unreliable, if Google cannot crawl the site properly – none of the SEO work lands. You are pushing water uphill.
This is a pattern we see more often than we should. An agency rebuilds a site, it looks fine on the surface, and then the rankings start to slide. The client brings in an SEO agency. The SEO agency does what they can. The rankings keep sliding. Eventually someone looks under the bonnet and finds that the build itself is the problem.
The fix is not more SEO. The fix is a better build.
With Pearn Kandola, we stripped out the old setup entirely and rebuilt it on the same clean, performance-first WordPress foundation we use for every project. The SEO team now has something they can actually work with. The internal team can manage content without calling anyone. And the platform reflects the credibility of an organisation that competes with the likes of Kornferry and EW Group for serious enterprise clients.
That is what a proper WordPress build looks like.
