Converting a Very Old HTML Website into a Mobile Friendly WordPress Site (That Looks Exactly Like the Old Site!)
This was a web design for Assured Stairlifts (assuredstairlifts.co.uk), a long established Keighley based company that specialises in refurbishing and installing stairlifts.
Their website had been built many, many years ago (c.2010), and while they were happy with the look of the site, the branding, etc, the site wasn’t performing well on mobile devices like phones or tablets.
This is often an issue with older HTML sites, they can’t render properly and are wider than the screen, in some cases (like this one) the visitor can neither “pinch” the screen to make the site smaller (or if they can the text becomes so small it’s impossible to read it), and also it’s not possible to scroll across to see the content that is being cut out.
Since the vast majority of traffic to the site was via mobiles, this was having a significant impact on visitor interaction and customer conversions, and also making it impractical to use Google Ads to drive traffic – there’s no point paying to get people to your site if they leave because the site is unusable – it’s just throwing money away.
So their objective was to keep the site looking as near to how it already did, but to make it mobile friendly, and then to set up an Ad campaign with Google.
In the end the easiest way to achieve this objective was to completely rebuild the site from the ground up using WordPress and Elementor as the theme builder, to create a completely bespoke WordPress theme, that looked as close to the original as possible.
We did add in a few conversion optimisation changes, like more prominent calls to action to encourage visitor engagement, and also some SEO adjustments such as rewriting some areas of the site, and increasing the interlinking between pages and sections.
We also made sure that the old “{dot}html” pages were redirected to the new, cleaner WordPress URL’s so that existing rankings wouldn’t be affected, and the site now ranks on page 1 of Google for many high value search terms like “refurbished stairlifts”
We then set up a Google Ads campaign to deliver laser focused traffic to specific pages.