The Victorian Society website design and build.
The Victorian Society's website was old, slow and impossible to update; we fixed that
Why did the Society need a new website?
The Victorian Society is the only UK charity dedicated to protecting Victorian and Edwardian buildings. Their website is central to everything they do.
It is how they attract new members, promote campaigns, publish casework, and encourage supporters to donate. Without a site that works properly, the whole operation suffers.
The old site had been allowed to grow for too long without any real structure or oversight. By the time the Society came to us, it was actively getting in their way. The team had largely stopped trying to update it because the process was so slow and frustrating. Content was going unpublished. Campaigns were not getting the visibility they needed. And a site that should have been converting visitors into members and donors was doing neither effectively.
This was not a cosmetic problem. The foundations were wrong.
Issues with the old site:
- The site had grown into an unstructured mess over many years
- It was virtually impossible for the team to update content without developer help
- The design was dated and no longer reflected the Society’s identity
- Important content was not getting indexed by search engines
- There was no schema markup anywhere on the site
- The site was not structured for featured snippets or AI citations
- Membership and donation journeys were unclear and unconvincing
Our approach
Project overview
This was not a simple redesign. It was a full rebuild, a rebrand, a content migration, and a complete rethink of how the site would be used day to day by a team of volunteers with varied technical ability.
Every decision we made was tested against one question: will this make the Society more effective online?
For the team managing the site:
- Easy content management was essential – technical ability across the volunteer team was varied
- Multiple user permission levels to control who could publish and edit what
- Image upload controls to prevent performance problems from oversized files
- Intuitive admin layout so editors could find what they needed without training every time
For visitors and SEO
- A logical URL structure and breadcrumb navigation so visitors and search engines always knew where they were
- Clear page hierarchy so the depth of content was easy to follow rather than overwhelming
- Larger font sizes and generous spacing to improve legibility across all devices
- Schema markup implemented throughout to support featured snippets and AI citations
Planning
With hundreds of live URLs, protecting existing search rankings was a priority from day one – not an afterthought. We audited every URL, mapped what needed to move, and kept redirects to a minimum by preserving as much of the existing structure as possible.
We also spent significant time planning how the Society’s team would actually use the site. The brief was not just to build something that looked good – it was to build something the team would genuinely use as a marketing tool. That required understanding their publishing workflow before we touched any code.
Design
The website was part of a wider rebrand, so we worked alongside our branding team rather than in isolation. The Society was making a significant shift away from a more traditional visual identity – something that needed careful handling with stakeholders who cared deeply about the organisation’s heritage.
We ran the design process collaboratively, presenting reasoning alongside options rather than just asking for sign-off. That approach meant fewer revision rounds and a result that had genuine buy-in rather than reluctant approval.
Website build
WordPress was the right platform for this project because of the flexibility it gives us at the code level – not because it was the easiest option. We built custom post types for news, casework, campaigns, events, and regional groups. We built a purpose-built set of ACF content blocks and disabled the default Gutenberg blocks entirely, so editors could only use layouts that were styled correctly and on-brand.
We also built a dedicated custom section for the Society’s annual ’10 most endangered buildings’ list – one of their highest-profile campaigns and a significant driver of press coverage and new members.
Hosting
The Society did not have internal technical resource to manage their own hosting, so we took that off their plate entirely. The site runs on managed WordPress hosting, monitored by us, with uptime alerts and regular performance checks built in.
Hosting is on a rolling monthly plan with no long-term contract – giving the Society full flexibility while removing the need for them to think about infrastructure at all.
Support
We provide ongoing support on a rolling monthly contract. The Society’s team can draw on that time for anything – development work, technical fixes, SEO, new design work, content updates, or anything else the site needs.
This means they always have access to the full Toast team without the overhead of managing a separate agency relationship for each type of work.
Got a similar challenge?
If your website is holding your organisation back – whether that is a content management problem, a search visibility problem, or both – we should have a conversation.
Tell us what you are working with and we will tell you honestly what we would do about it.
The results
1,000,000
Site visits in the first month post-launch
Compared to an average of 15,000 month
12+
Hours per week saved in previously lost admin time
As the old site was clunky, managing the content was hard work
20+ users
Built for easy updating by the Society’s diverse volunteer team
This was previously not available to the society on the old website
25+
Bespoke templates built around core functions for easy updates and further development
This future-proofs the site for further development if needed
40%
Increase in site speed and Google PageSpeed scores post-launch
The previous site scored less than 50/100
450+
Pages migrated from the old site into the new WordPress CMS
This saved the society significant time on the rebuild project
Toast has been the very best partner. They have been patient and supremely helpful.
Their team have responded to our brief and given us over and above what we asked…
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.
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.
Custom post types
Custom post types were built for news, casework, campaigns, events, and regional groups. This keeps content structured and consistently templated, and gives us precise control over the URL structure – which matters both for usability and for SEO.
Custom functions
User role management is handled at the theme level rather than through plugins – it is more reliable, more secure, and does not add plugin overhead. The site also runs a customised WooCommerce installation for the Society’s fundraising merchandise store.
Why WordPress was a good choice for this client.
People often assume WordPress is a blogging platform. It is not – or at least, that is not what it is for businesses like the Victorian Society.
The reason we chose WordPress for this project is the same reason we choose it for almost every project: it does not tell the client what they can and cannot do. We built the CMS around how the Society actually works – their content types, their user structure, their publishing workflow. They did not have to adapt to the software. The software adapted to them.
That is the thing that gets missed in comparisons between WordPress and drag-and-drop platforms like Webflow or Squarespace. Those tools have limits built in by design. WordPress does not. If a client needs it, we can build it – and we build it inside the theme, not by bolting on a stack of third-party plugins that slow the site down and fall apart when they update.
The Victorian Society now has a website that does exactly what their organisation needs it to do – no more, no less. That is what a proper WordPress build looks like.
