Illustrative exampleConstruction / Architecture Firms

An architecture portfolio that stopped breaking every time a plugin updated

An architecture practice's WordPress site ran on twenty-nine plugins and a dead theme. We moved it to Strapi and a static front end, and there's nothing left on the public side to patch.

This shows the kind of work we do. It is not a client engagement, and the business in it is invented.

Where it started

The problem

Four of the twenty-nine plugins existed to fix problems caused by the other twenty-five. The project gallery depended on a theme its developer had abandoned in 2022.

So every update was a gamble. Twice in one year the gallery came back blank the morning after an automatic update, and one of those mornings fell in the week of a competition shortlist.

What the partners wanted was big images that load quickly, and a way to add a project without phoning anyone.

What changed

What we did

We moved the content into Strapi and built the front end in Astro as static pages. A project is a record with its photos, its credits and a short write-up. Publish one and the site rebuilds in under two minutes.

Images are resized at build time into the few sizes a browser actually requests. Hero shots that used to weigh eleven megabytes now arrive in a few hundred kilobytes and look the same.

Before switching DNS we crawled the old site and checked a redirect for each of its 212 paths.

Strapi sits behind a login on a separate host. What the public sees is plain files, and plain files don't need plugin updates.

Built with

  • Strapi
  • Astro
  • Cloudflare Pages
  • PostgreSQL
  • Sharp

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