We spent about fifteen years designing, building and rescuing websites on legacy content management systems. This page explains exactly why we no longer take that work on, and what we build instead.
Building on legacy CMS platforms
Client sites maintained and repaired
WordPress builds we now take on
Original code in everything we sell
None of this is a swipe at anyone running a CMS site today. Millions do, and plenty are perfectly happy. It is simply a description of what we saw, repeatedly, across hundreds of businesses — and why we decided our name should not be attached to it any more.
A stock CMS install loads a theme framework, a page builder, a dozen scripts and a stack of database queries on every single request. Our React builds ship a fraction of that weight, so the first paint happens almost instantly and the admin area opens as fast as the public pages.
A typical WordPress site depends on 15 to 40 plugins written by unrelated developers on unrelated release schedules. One update breaks another, a maintainer disappears, and suddenly a checkout stops working on a Friday afternoon. We write the features into the build instead.
Over fifteen years and hundreds of clients we removed malware, cleaned injected spam links, restored defaced pages and locked out brute-force logins more times than we can count. Almost every incident traced back to an outdated plugin or theme, not to the owner doing anything wrong.
Heavy CMS sites need caching layers, object caches, image optimisation services and larger hosting plans just to feel acceptable. Our builds run happily on lean modern hosting because there is far less work to do per request.
The platform is free. The maintenance retainers, licence renewals, emergency fixes, migration work and premium plugin subscriptions are not. We watched clients spend more on keeping a site upright in one year than the site had cost to build.
Bending a theme into an exact design, then patching a page builder to behave on mobile, eats days. Writing the interface directly is quicker, cleaner and produces something we can hand over without apology.
When a page misbehaves on a plugin-stacked CMS, the first hour is spent deactivating things to find the culprit. On a codebase we authored, the cause is visible in the code within minutes.
This is not theory. Our own sites were WordPress for years, and our team built and maintained client sites across WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and similar platforms. We changed because we lived with the consequences, not because it was fashionable.
Because the storefront is React rather than a Liquid theme, apps from the Shopify App Store that inject themselves into a theme will not all work. Many app features can be rebuilt directly into your front end instead, but if your business depends on a specific theme-injecting app, tell us before you buy and we will be straight with you about whether it fits.
Open any live preview in the catalog, click into the client and admin areas, and watch how quickly they load. That is the whole argument, in about three seconds.
One email a week: fresh ready-made systems, launch playbooks and subscriber-only pricing before anything hits the catalog. No spam, unsubscribe in one click.