Strategic budget reallocation leads to long-term gains for Plumbs

Plumbs needed a flexible website its own team could update, while keeping its hard-won search visibility safe

Plumbs reupholsters furniture, makes loose covers and fits made-to-measure curtains for homes across the UK. Every sale starts with a home visit, so the website has one core job: turning interest into visit requests.

The site ran on a bespoke Laravel build. Every change needed a developer. New pages took time, and adding features to improve the customer journey was slow and costly. The marketing team wanted to test, learn and improve quickly, and the platform was holding them back.

Moving platform carried real commercial risk. Plumbs ranks for some of the biggest searches in its category, including “sofa covers” with around 60,500 searches a month. Those rankings bring in a steady flow of high-intent visitors, and a poorly managed migration could erase years of search visibility.

Budget was the other pressure. Funding a rebuild meant pausing some regular marketing for a period, so Plumbs needed confidence that a short-term trade-off would bring long-term gains. The aim was a flexible, scalable website that kept search performance safe and gave the team control.

We front-loaded the budget into a staged rebuild, with SEO planned into every step from day one

We made a bold call: put the budget up front. During the core build phase, we paused regular SEO, content and CRO work and moved that spend into design, development and technical SEO. Paid search kept running throughout, so leads kept coming in while the new site came together. In April 2024, Google Ads leads nearly doubled year on year on the same spend, with cost per lead down 49%.

We broke the project into clear stages, so Plumbs could review and sign off each one before the next began. User flows came first in December. Content mapping, site structure and wireframes followed in January, then prototypes in February.

SEO shaped every stage. We kept the structure of the core pages that already ranked well. We mapped existing content to its new home and planned a redirect for every URL that changed. That gave search engines a clear path from the old site to the new one and protected the rankings Plumbs relied on.

We also planned for life after launch, lining up the development and CRO work the new platform would make possible.

We rebuilt the site on WordPress with flexible design blocks, fresh content and smarter tools for the team

We moved the site from Laravel to WordPress and built a flexible library of design blocks, so the Plumbs team can now create and update pages themselves. We refreshed the design in line with the brand style guide, with new gallery, hero, newsletter and form designs, and accurate colours for every fabric swatch.

We wrote new content for the core services, with pages explaining the what, why and how of curtains, reupholstery and covers. We also refreshed the Inspiration and Who We Are pages. The new structure gave the colour and pattern filters their own indexable pages, so search engines could rank them for new keywords.

Build and QA were completed in April 2024, and the site went live at the end of the month. Post-launch amends were finished by mid-May.

Once the site was live, we kept improving it. We added a postcode lookup to every form to make enquiries faster. We set up an automated feed that sends fabric details from Plumbs’ Oracle business system straight into WordPress. We also improved affiliate tracking and updated the cookie consent setup.

Rankings rose above pre-launch levels within weeks, and conversion rate climbed 14% year on year

Success came down to three things: protecting search visibility through the move, improving the website’s conversion rate, and giving the team a platform that makes growth easier.

The site went live in late April 2024, and the results came quickly:

• 14% increase in conversion rate year on year in the months after launch
• Rankings passed pre-launch levels within weeks
• Between April and May 2024, “sofa covers” (60,500 monthly searches) rose from 8th to 4th, and “two seater sofa covers” from 8th to 4th
• Over the same period, “armchair covers” rose from 6th to 1st position.
• Paid search for curtains campaigns, launched as a regional test in March 2024, cut cost per lead 80% year on year by July

The ranking gains came from careful redirect planning and keeping a page structure search engines already trusted. The conversion uplift came from a clearer site built around the visit request.

Plumbs now owns a flexible, fast website that its team controls, ready for continuous testing and growth

Plumbs came through a high-risk replatform stronger in search, with a website that converts better and a team that can update it themselves.

With the platform in place, regular SEO, content, CRO and development work picked back up. A CRO testing programme went live within weeks of launch, and the new filter pages gave SEO fresh ground to win. The team can now launch pages, test ideas and respond to demand at pace. The automated fabric feed also removes a regular manual upload task from the team’s week.

The budget call paid off. A focused, front-loaded investment set Plumbs up for easier, lower-cost growth for the long term.

The lesson: when a platform is slowing a business down, putting budget into it first can bring stronger long-term returns than spreading spend thinly across activity.