Stephen Therapy

Where Stephen started

Stephen runs a hypnotherapy and careers advice practice in Stockport. His website had been on WordPress for years, built and hosted by someone else, and that person was closing the hosting down at the end of September. The domain, the DNS, the email forwarding and the site itself all lived in an account Stephen could not log into.

On top of the deadline, the site was slow, he could not change his own fees or add an article without asking someone, and a second domain pointed at it that nobody had touched in years.

You do not have to take my word for any of that. The Wayback Machine has the old site as it stood on 6 September 2024, so you can compare it with the one that is live now.

What had to keep working

• All of it, before the old hosting closed at the end of September
• His 37 articles, at the same addresses, so links people already had to them would not break
• Mail to his info address, which ran through the hosting that was closing
• The second domain, which pointed at the old site
• The service pages that already had search traffic

What I did

I rebuilt the site as plain files, so there is no database, no plugins and nothing to patch. Every service from the old site was rebuilt, including four pages that were not in the original plan, at no extra charge, because dropping them would have cost him the search traffic they already had.

His 37 articles came across from the old site with their images. They kept their original addresses, so any link anyone already had to one of them still works. A simple editor sits behind a login, so he changes his fees, reviews, free guides and contact details himself, in a form rather than in code. The service page wording stays with me on purpose, because that is the part that makes a claim. The contact form sends straight to his inbox and was proven end to end before launch.

The move was the part with the deadline on it. The domain was registered in one place, the settings that point it at the site and the email were held in another, and the email forwarding sat on the hosting that was about to disappear. Both domains were moved onto new hosting. Mail to his info address was set up to keep reaching his inbox, and tested before the switch rather than after. The second domain now redirects to the right page on the new site. Old page addresses redirect to their replacements, so the links he had built up over the years still work.

The site went live on the evening of 16 September, a fortnight before the old hosting closed.

Where he ended up

• A site that loads fast and has nothing to keep updated
• Top marks on Google’s own speed test, and above 95 on mobile
• An editor he can use without asking me
• The domain, hosting and email in accounts in his own name
• Running costs down to the price of the domain, about £10 a year
• Visitor stats with no cookie banner, because the tool used does not need one

If your own site is in the same position, here is how I rebuild and move one.

For the technically curious

The site is built with Astro and generated as plain HTML files. The editor is Sveltia CMS, the contact form sends through Web3Forms, and the site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Both domains were moved onto Cloudflare, with the DNS rebuilt record by record.

Tested on Google’s PageSpeed Insights in September 2026, the home page scores 100 out of 100 on desktop for performance, accessibility, best practices and search. On mobile, which is the harder test, performance stays above 95. Anyone can run the same test on stephentherapy.com and check.