Replacing a decade-long partnership
Clare had looked after InStil's website for ten years. Finding someone who could pick up where she left off, with the same understanding of the brand and the way the team worked, was the first hurdle.
A handover, done right
Showcasing Oxfordshire's award-winning bathroom designers
How we moved Oxfordshire's award-winning bathroom designers to a new platform and grew time on site by 110%.
Jordan, thank you ever so much for a smooth transition from one platform to another, and from our previous web designer Clare to yourself.
Clare looked after us exceptionally well for our first 10 years. She has now winded down, and we wish her all the best.
Jordan, we are super pleased with your work and are looking forward to working together with you and Akoca for the next decade :).
Martina Landhed
Founder, Instil Design
Project overview
Instil Design
InStil Design is an award-winning kitchen and bathroom design studio based in Oxfordshire. Led by Founder and Creative Director Martina, the team turn their clients’ ideas into spaces they actually love spending time in, from kitchens built for everyday family life to bathrooms designed to slow the day down. Every project is shaped by careful material choices, attention to detail, and a focus on making each space look great and work beautifully.
A trusted partnership coming to an end
After ten years working with their original web designer Clare, InStil Design were facing a familiar moment for any established business. Clare was retiring, and the website she'd built and maintained for them needed a new home, without losing anything they'd built up over the decade.
Protecting existing search visibility
A decade of rankings, traffic, and online visibility was on the line. Migrations done wrong, have a way of undoing that quietly, with traffic tailing off in the weeks that follow and enquiries quietly drying up alongside it.
Wanting autonomy over the site
Day-to-day, Martina and the team wanted the freedom to make small updates themselves, a tweak to copy, a new project added, without needing to ask anyone. Whatever came next had to give them that kind of hands-on access.
Keeping the site working through the move
A migration carries small risks that can quickly become bigger ones, broken pages, missing content, forms that stop working. Any of them, left unnoticed, could cost the business real enquiries before anyone realises something's wrong.
A move that protected what mattered
The starting point with the project was simple. Understand what was already working, what the team wanted to keep, and where they needed more freedom to run things themselves. From there, the work became about protecting what they'd built up over the decade and adding the layers that would carry the business forward.
We migrated the site to WordPress, planning the move carefully to keep their search visibility, rankings, and traffic intact. The existing brand and feel carried across faithfully, preserving what Clare and the team had built up over the years.
Once we got into the site, a few things became clear. It hadn't been built with mobile in mind, and by then most of InStil's visitors were arriving on a phone. Pages were slow to load, weighed down by oversized images and years of accumulated weight. And the service pages, the ones doing the heaviest lifting for enquiries, were written more like a brochure than a clear path for someone ready to
book a project.
So we did the work. Rebuilt the site to work properly on a phone, with layouts designed for smaller screens rather than squeezed down from desktop. Cleaned up every image, cut what had built up over the years, and gave the new site a stronger footing than the old one had. And redesigned the service pages around how InStil's customers actually buy. A clearer view of the process. One confident next step. An FAQ block answering the questions Martina hears most often on calls.
Once the new site was live, we walked the team through how to manage it themselves, a tweak here, an adjustment there, all without needing to ask. And from launch onwards, we've been on hand to handle the
technical side of things, the upkeep, the updates, the bits that fall outside the team's comfort zone.
Before
After
A clean handover, with a measurable lift
Migrating a website that's been working for years is the kind of project most business owners put off. The risks of losing rankings, traffic, or hard-earned visibility are real. Done right, the move protects what's there and adds to it.
A year on, the site is performing better across the metrics that matter most.
110%
Time on site
Visitors are spending more than twice as long exploring the work
77%
Contact page bounce rate
Far fewer people leaving without taking action
50%
Enquiries completed
More visitors completing the contact form
Measured a year after launch against the same period the year before
InStil Design moved their website without losing the visibility, rankings, or continuity they’d built up over time.
They gained a platform they could run themselves, and a partner on hand for everything else. Years on, that arrangement is still working.
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