Case Study: Rebuilding a Coaching Website Off WordPress

James Tugwell is a golf and endurance performance coach in Buckinghamshire. His coaching was excellent. His website wasn't keeping up. We've just launched his new site, and it's a good example of a problem a lot of small businesses have without realising it: the platform, not the content, is what's holding them back.

The problem: hours of work for a site that never looked right

James was running his business on WordPress. Building pages, updating content and publishing blogs took far too much of his own time, and despite all those hours, the site never quite matched the brand he was building. Every change meant fighting the theme and the page builder, so time that should have gone into his athletes went into the website instead.

That's a common story with off-the-shelf WordPress themes. They look fine in the demo, but the moment you want something specific, you're working around the theme rather than with it.

The approach: rebuild properly, once

Rather than patch another theme, we rebranded and rebuilt the site from scratch. Three decisions shaped the project:

• Bespoke, not templated. Built with Next.js, a modern framework designed for speed, so the design does exactly what James's brand needs rather than what a theme allows.
• Keep every Google ranking. Every old WordPress URL was mapped and redirected to its new home, so the search visibility James had already earned carried straight over.
• Plan for phase two from day one. All content is structured to match a modern CMS, so giving James his own editor next is a quick setup job, not another rebuild.

What the new site does

The new James Tugwell Performance Coaching (opens in a new tab) site has separate golf and endurance pathways, so each type of athlete lands on content written for them. A Performance Coach questionnaire recommends where an athlete should focus, which turns casual visitors into qualified conversations. Free consultations can be booked inline through Calendly without leaving the page, live Google reviews sit alongside the services, and the contact form goes straight to James's inbox.

Under the hood, analytics only run with visitor consent, and the site is built to load fast on phones as well as desktops.

What's next

The site is only just live, so it's too early for meaningful traffic numbers, and we won't invent any. We'll share real results once there's enough data to be worth reporting. Phase two adds a modern CMS, so James can publish blogs and edit pages himself in minutes rather than hours.

Is your website costing you time?

If you recognise James's starting point, a site that takes too long to update and still doesn't look right, our website rebuild package is built for exactly this: a bespoke site, every old URL redirected, and speed and SEO foundations built in. You can see the full project in the James Tugwell case study.