Scroll previewTheir old site was only three years old, and that was the problem. It had been built on top of, year after year, until a business that now wraps everything from superyachts in Cowes to scaffolds in Soho was being sold by a site still shaped around what it did in 2023. We rebuilt it as 77 static pages, and along the way found AI-generated photographs sitting in the client’s own image library.
What was wrong with a site that was only three years old?
Nothing was broken. It had simply been added to for three years without anyone stepping back. The client had been steadily publishing location landing pages to chase local searches, and each one was bolted onto a structure that was never designed to hold them.
Concretely, what we found:
The last point mattered more than it looked. Search Console still listed 337 injected URLs — casino and bingo pages — sitting under the client’s own domain.
- Five sectors — scaffolding, marine, industrial, transport, aviation — buried in a flat menu, with no way to see the range at a glance.
- Location pages that all read the same, with the town name swapped in.
- No projects or case studies anywhere, despite the crews having worked on jobs most competitors would never get near.
- Images at around 500 pixels wide, cropped from screenshots, used as full-width headers.
- WordPress, which had been compromised at some point and used to publish spam pages.
Why we rebuilt it as static HTML rather than another WordPress theme
Because the site had already been hacked once, and a static site has nothing to hack. There is no database, no login page, no plugins and no PHP. The spam injection that hit the old site is not possible on the new one.
It also solved the maintenance problem that created the mess in the first place. Every page is generated from Python templates, so the navigation, the enquiry form and the footer exist once. Change the mega menu and all 77 pages change together. What we delivered:
- 77 pages generated from templates, deployed to Cloudflare as static files.
- A mega menu with all six service routes as cards, each with a thumbnail and a one-line description.
- Pop-up quote forms on every page, with service, postcode and job detail fields.
- Filterable galleries, and photo carousels placed inside the location pages.
- Clean directory URLs matching the old WordPress pattern, so existing links kept working.
- A content security policy, HSTS and a full set of security headers on every response.
How we structured 36 location pages without writing the same page 36 times
We gave every town its own focus sector, and wrote the page around that. Portsmouth, Southampton, Poole and Plymouth lead on marine because that is what those harbours generate. London, Croydon and Watford lead on scaffolding. Farnborough, Biggin Hill and Hounslow lead on aviation, because that is what sits on their doorstep.
Each page then carries genuinely local detail — the marinas, the industrial estates, the postcodes, the neighbouring towns — rather than a find-and-replace of the town name. The two largest, Manchester and Liverpool, go further with a "types of shrink wrap jobs" section naming Ancoats mill conversions, Trafford Park, the Port of Liverpool and Cammell Laird.
- 36 town pages, from Cowes and Port Solent to Aberdeen, Glasgow and Dubai.
- Six regional groupings, each with a "request a job" card so nobody assumes they are outside the coverage.
- Three regions with no town pages at all — the Midlands, Wales and the West, East Anglia — added purely so those visitors are not put off.
- Two pages restored that existed on the old site and had been missed: Hounslow and Kingston upon Thames.
How do you show proof when a client has never published a single project?
You go and find it. The client had no case studies, but the crews had been on some remarkable jobs, and the evidence was sitting in their social posts and their phones.
We built a projects section from scratch — a hub, eight project pages, and carousels that surface the relevant project inside the matching service and location pages. The jobs include Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in Soho, Imperial College London, a temporary roof in Mayfair, a full building encapsulation off Tottenham Court Road, a large temporary structure in Salisbury and a sandblasting containment enclosure beside the water.
Each one names the scaffolding contractor where the client was happy to name them — Pinnacle Scaffolding at Ronnie Scott’s, Stellar Scaffolding on the temporary structure. That is the strongest trust signal on the page, and no competitor in this sector does it.
What we found in the client’s own image library
Two of the aviation photographs were AI-generated, and we removed them. A perfectly smooth white helicopter with wrapped landing skids and flawless studio lighting, and an airliner sitting on an implausible red cradle. Neither was a real job. There was also a stock hard-hat portrait being used as the About page hero.
We were nearly too aggressive about it. We also pulled the Ronnie Scott’s project believing its photograph was stock — the client then confirmed the job was genuinely theirs and sent the original photos, including the club’s neon sign glowing inside the wrapped scaffold. It went back in, and it now leads the projects page.
The wider fix was eleven photographs, all roughly 500 pixels wide, that had been cropped from screenshots of an even older site. One was on 74 pages. Every one was replaced with a real photograph from the client’s own jobs.
One flag we raised and have not resolved: the photographs from the "Tottenham" project show a Windmill Street sign and the BT Tower in shot, which places the job in Fitzrovia, off Tottenham Court Road, rather than Tottenham in north London. The URL has to stay as it is to preserve its history, but the client needs to confirm the area before we label the page.
How we structured the search work
We ran a full keyword audit first, then built the structure around what it found rather than around what the old site happened to have. Three things came out of it.
The first was that competitors were winning with named project case studies, not service copy. The second was that Manchester was effectively uncontested — page one was a packaging supplier selling pallet wrap. The third was that the guides that rank in this sector all win on process detail, and none of them are laid out for a reader.
An honest note on rankings. We do not promise positions, and nobody credible can. What we control is the structure, the content, the technical health and the speed. The client reports already being surfaced in AI assistant answers about shrink wrapping, which is encouraging, but it is early and we are not going to dress it up as a result.
- 36 location pages, each with its own title, meta description and single H1.
- Five complete guides — scaffold, boat, industrial, transport and aircraft shrink wrapping — each with a snippet-length definition, a step-by-step process, a comparison table, costs and a glossary.
- Schema throughout: Article, HowTo and FAQPage on the guides, Article and BreadcrumbList on the projects, FAQPage on the locations hub.
- A sitemap index split into six files — pages, services, locations, projects, guides, blog — so Search Console reports indexing per section rather than as one number.
- Redirects for every legacy WordPress path found in the coverage export: category and project-category archives, RSS feeds, attachment pages and the old yacht URL.
- The 337 injected spam URLs left to return 404, deliberately not blocked in robots.txt — blocked URLs cannot be crawled, so Google never sees that they are gone.
How does an enquiry actually reach the crew?
Straight to their inbox, with the job described in the subject line. Enquiries post through Web3Forms, so nothing is stored on the site itself — there is no database to breach and no admin to log into.
The subject arrives as "New enquiry: Marine & boats · PO31 · Dave Smith", and the page the enquiry came from is recorded with it. That suits a trade where the crews are on site, not at a desk.
- A pop-up quote form on every page, plus a full form on the contact page.
- A sticky bar on mobile with Enquire, WhatsApp and Services.
- A thank-you page that does real work: what happens next in four steps, and two big buttons to send photos — WhatsApp with the message pre-written, or email with a checklist already in the body.
- That matters because the form cannot carry attachments, and photographs are what turn a rough figure into a fixed price.
What the business has now
And since then, a second market: we built Shrink Wrap Malta, a separate marine-first site for Malta and Gozo.
Designed, written, audited, rebuilt and launched in September 2026.
- 77 pages, against a site that previously had no projects section and no guides.
- 36 location pages with genuine local content, including two restored from the old site.
- Eight named project pages, with contractors credited.
- Five long-form guides that answer the questions buyers actually ask before they enquire.
- Google PageSpeed Insights scores of 100 on desktop and 96 on mobile, reported by the client after launch. Scores move with test conditions, but the work behind them — AVIF and WebP images, self-hosted subset fonts, deferred analytics, measured image sizing — does not.
- A site that cannot be injected with spam pages, with a content security policy blocking third-party scripts outright.
- Analytics running lawfully, with consent denied by default until the visitor accepts.
Talk to us about a build like this
See our pricing at whiteskidigital.com/pricing/, or read about web design on the Isle of Wight at whiteskidigital.com/web-design-isle-of-wight/.
More on our work for construction and trade businesses: whiteskidigital.com/web-design-for-construction-and-trades/.
WhatsApp us on 07725 541812 — send a link to your current site and we will tell you honestly whether it needs rebuilding or just fixing.
METADATA — NOT FOR PUBLICATION
Suggested URL: whiteskidigital.com/case-studies/shrink-wrap-uk/
Title tag: Web Design for Shrink Wrap UK — Isle of Wight Case Study (56 characters)
Meta description: How we rebuilt a three-year-old WordPress site as 77 static pages for Shrink Wrap UK — 36 location pages, a new projects section and 100/96 PageSpeed. (151 characters)
Primary keyword: web design Isle of Wight
Secondary keywords: website rebuild case study, static site web design UK, SEO location pages, WordPress to static migration, web design for trades
Schema to add: Article + BreadcrumbList + FAQPage
Internal links in: case studies hub, /web-design-isle-of-wight/, /web-design-for-construction-and-trades/, pricing page
Internal links out: pricing, /web-design-isle-of-wight/, sector page, contact
To confirm before publishing: exact project start date (timescale currently stated as September 2026); the sector URL above; and whether the client is happy for the Ronnie Scott’s, Imperial College and Pinnacle/Stellar Scaffolding names to appear in our case study as well as on theirs.
Frequently asked questions
What does a website like this cost?
This was a £5,000 build, because of its size — 77 pages, a keyword audit, a projects section written from scratch and five long-form guides. Most of our work is smaller. Our packages are £1,000 for a complete site and £1,500 for everything. Hosting and care is £200 a year.
How long does a build like this take?
This one was designed, built and launched in September 2026. A standard £1,000 site is considerably quicker. The variable is almost never the build — it is how fast photographs, job details and sign-off come back.
Do you work with businesses on the Isle of Wight?
Yes, and across the Solent in Portsmouth, Southampton and Poole. We work remotely with clients across the UK and internationally, which is how this project ran. Shrink Wrap UK works UK-wide from an Isle of Wight base, so the site had to do the same.
Why static HTML rather than WordPress?
Because it is faster, it cannot be hacked the way this client had been, and it costs nothing to run. There is no database, no login page and no plugins to update. The trade-off is that the client does not edit pages themselves — we handle changes, which for a site this structured is the right arrangement anyway.
Can you rebuild a site without losing its existing rankings?
That is the aim, and it is mostly about URLs. We kept the existing directory structure so old links still resolve, redirected every legacy path we could find in Search Console, and restored two location pages that had been dropped. Nobody can guarantee rankings through a migration, but losing them is usually a URL problem, and URL problems are avoidable.
Do you write the content as well?
Yes. Every page here was written by us — the location pages, the five guides, the project write-ups and the legal pages. We work from the client’s own jobs and photographs, and we do not invent claims. Where we could not evidence something, we flagged it rather than writing around it.