WirehouseYour site is healthy. The version it runs on stopped getting security patches three years ago.
We built your current website, and it has done its job well. The major version we built on has since been dropped from support by the Gatsby project itself. This sets out what that means, what we would replace it with, and what we would add while we are in there.
Why Now
Not a speed problem. A support, security and opportunity problem.
We chose Gatsby. It was the right call in 2021. It is not the right place to stay.
When we built wirehouse-es.com we put it on Gatsby, a React framework that was, at the time, one of the strongest choices available for a fast, secure, statically generated site. It delivered exactly that. Your site is quick, it is stable, and it has served the business well.
We are going to be precise here, because the loose version of this argument is easy to rebut. Gatsby is not dead. The project is still maintained, downloads are steady, and Netlify have said publicly they are not sunsetting it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is overselling.
The issue is Gatsby 4 specifically, and it is documented by the Gatsby project itself:
Netlify's own maintainer described the current position as "limited development (security fixes, limited dependency updates, low-hanging-fruit bug fixes)". That is a reasonable place for a framework to be. It is not a reasonable place for a business-critical marketing site to sit three and a half years behind, on a major version the project has formally stopped patching.
So there are two honest options, and we would rather show you both than pretend there is one. You can upgrade in-framework to Gatsby 5, which is cheaper and buys you supported status. Or you can migrate to Next.js or Astro, which costs more now and removes the question for the next five years. Our recommendation is the migration, but only because of what we want to build on top of it, which is the next section.
What this actually costs you, in plain terms
Nothing today. That is precisely why it is easy to leave alone, and precisely why it is worth dealing with now rather than in eighteen months.
An unmaintained framework does not break. It ages. Security patches slow down and then stop. Each dependency upgrade gets harder because fewer people are fixing the edges. The pool of developers willing to work in it shrinks, so the cost of every future change quietly rises. The decision is not whether to move, it is whether you move while the site is healthy and we can plan it, or later under pressure because something has broken or a new requirement cannot be met.
We would rather tell you this while there is no fire. Replatforming a working site is a project. Replatforming a broken one is an emergency, and emergencies cost considerably more than this proposal does.
What We Checked
Measured on your live site, 23 September 2026
The good news first, because most of it is good
We are not going to tell you your website is broken. It is not. Here is what we actually measured, including the things that are working well.
Why we are showing you the healthy numbers too
Because an agency that tells you everything is broken is selling you something. On real-user Core Web Vitals you pass on every metric and you are the fastest site of the seven we measured, your own parent company included. We are not going to pretend otherwise to make a case.
The case for moving rests on three things that are all verifiable: a major version that no longer receives security patches, a set of structural SEO gaps that are cheapest to fix during a rebuild, and roughly 120,000 monthly searches your competitors are capturing with tools you do not have.
Prototypes
Working, clickable, built this week in your brand
Two things we would like you to click
These are real, working prototypes rather than flat pictures. Open them, type into them, and see how the site could feel.
Modern, on brand
Homepage direction
Your existing colours and logo, brought into a cleaner, more current layout. A working calculator sits in the hero, so the first thing a visitor can do is get an answer rather than read a paragraph.
Open the concept →Fully interactive
Redundancy, tribunal exposure, holiday
Three working tools with the rate table exposed so your team can update the statutory figures each April without a developer. Change a rate and every calculation updates instantly.
Open the calculators →Why calculators, and not just a nicer design
Every one of these answers a question a UK employer is already typing into Google and, increasingly, into ChatGPT. A page that gives a real answer earns the visit, earns the link, and gets quoted back by AI engines in a way that a services page never will.
More importantly, someone who has just worked out that a redundancy will cost them eleven thousand pounds, or that a tribunal claim could run past thirty, is at the exact moment of maximum intent. That is a far better place to introduce Wirehouse than a contact form.
The Commercial Case
Where the market is, and where Wirehouse is
Your competitors are winning on tools you do not have
We checked every major UK HR and employment law provider for free interactive calculators. The result is stark enough that it is really the whole proposal.
| Provider | Free calculators | Domain rating | Organic keywords | Monthly organic traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BrightHR | 13 | 70 | 2,209 | 202,915 |
| Croner | 6 | 60 | 3,915 | 21,431 |
| Citation | 5 | 64 | 1,967 | 26,024 |
| Avensure | 11 | 54 | 999 | 15,331 |
| Peninsula | 2 | 64 | 3,019 | 18,754 |
| WorkNest | 0 | 67 | 575 | 5,286 |
| Wirehouse | 0 | 36 | 165 | 662 |
Ahrefs, Great Britain, September 2026. Calculator counts verified by fetching each provider’s tools directly. Peninsula and Croner are the same group, Peninsula having acquired Croner in 2015. WorkNest is shown because it is the most directly comparable operator, and it has no public calculators either.
The single number that matters
Citation’s holiday entitlement calculator is the second most visited page on their entire website, at roughly 2,900 visits a month. That one page pulls more than four times the organic traffic of the whole of wirehouse-es.com.
Croner’s maternity pay calculator is their top content page at 1,671 a month, roughly double their own homepage. Avensure’s working hours calculator out-performs their homepage too. This is not a marginal tactic in this market. It is how the category is won.
The demand is real, and most of it is not hard to reach
UK monthly search volume with Ahrefs keyword difficulty. At your domain rating of 36, anything under about 20 is genuinely winnable.
| Search term | Monthly searches | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|
| redundancy calculator | 28,579 | 18 |
| holiday calculator | 16,594 | 24 |
| holiday entitlement calculator | 15,716 | 32 |
| annual leave calculator | 13,707 | 6 |
| pro rata calculator | 12,740 | 0 |
| risk assessment template | 12,479 | 1 |
| maternity pay calculator | 8,114 | 35 |
| statutory redundancy calculator | 4,876 | 16 |
| bradford factor calculator | 3,064 | 2 |
| statutory sick pay calculator | 719 | 0 |
Roughly 120,000 searches a month across this set, a large share of it at difficulty 0 to 18.
One caveat we would rather raise ourselves
The tribunal exposure calculator we built you is not a traffic play. “Employment tribunal cost” gets about 51 searches a month. We built it because it qualifies a lead better than any other tool on this list: someone modelling a thirty thousand pound exposure is a different prospect from someone checking a holiday balance. Treat redundancy, holiday and pro rata as the traffic engine, and tribunal as the sales tool.
Before We Rebuild Anything
Six findings on the current site, worth fixing either way
Some of this is ours to put right
We built this site, so where these are our doing we say so plainly rather than presenting them as discoveries.
1. Nineteen whitepapers and twenty-nine webinars are orphaned
They are live and they are good. No hub page links to any of them, so the only route in is the sitemap. Your whitepaper hub, your health and safety whitepaper hub, your resources-guides page and your past webinars page all render with zero content links. You have paid for this content and it is invisible. This is the single cheapest win on the site and it does not need a rebuild.
2. No structured data anywhere
There is no JSON-LD on the homepage, the service pages or any article. No Organization, no Service, no FAQ, no Article markup. Blog posts also declare og:type = website rather than article, and carry no machine-readable published date. This is exactly the information AI engines use to decide what a page is and whether to cite it.
3. Test and staging pages are publicly indexable
/test/, /landing-page-test/, /landing-page/, /result/ and /download-2/ all return 200, carry no noindex, and sit in your sitemap. A COVID-19 resource hub is also still live.
4. The WordPress backend is publicly reachable
Your headless CMS answers publicly on wirehouse.sd-clients.com. That is our hosting, so this one is squarely ours. The REST API is open, including the users endpoint, which lists author names and login slugs. It is a standard hardening gap rather than a breach, and it is a routine fix that we will do whether or not this proposal goes anywhere. Your whitepaper PDFs also download from that address rather than your own domain, which takes visitors off your brand at the exact moment they are converting.
5. There is no proof on the site at all
No case studies, no testimonials, no client count, no named clients anywhere on wirehouse-es.com. Meanwhile Peninsula leads with 44,173 business owners, Citation with 30,000 plus UK businesses, Croner with over 14,000, and BrightHR with 120,000. You are competing for the same buyer with none of the same reassurance on the page.
You also have a genuinely strong differentiator that is currently invisible. Citation’s own published pricing small print anchors to a seven year term. Your position, in your own words, is “no auto-renewals and unrealistic termination periods”. That is the sharpest counter-message in this market and it sits buried in body copy rather than being a headline.
6. Roughly 500 of your 916 URLs are tag and pagination pages
252 tag pages alone. Against 343 posts and 77 real pages, that is a lot of thin content diluting the site. Publishing has also slowed to five posts in the whole of 2026, which is worth a conversation in its own right.
The good news in all of this
Every AI crawler we tested reaches your site and gets a 200, your content is server rendered so they can read it, and you already publish an AI notice, which tells us your team is thinking about this properly. You are starting from a better place than most.
The Plan
Replatform, then build the things the old stack made awkward
Four phases, no big bang
The current site stays live and untouched until the replacement is proven. There is no window where Wirehouse is without a website.
Audit, content model and design direction
- Full inventory of the current site, every page, form and integration
- Content model built around your three service lines
- Design direction signed off from the concept you have already seen
- Redirect map drafted so no existing ranking is lost
Rebuild on Next.js with a CMS your team can drive
- Next.js, the framework the React ecosystem has consolidated around
- Headless CMS so marketing can publish without a developer
- All existing content migrated, with URLs preserved wherever possible
- The three calculators built as reusable, embeddable components
- Legacy polyfills and unused icon fonts removed
Test against the live site before anything switches
- Staging site for your team to work through properly
- Side by side performance and crawlability comparison
- Redirects tested one by one before launch, not after
- Analytics and lead routing verified end to end
Launch, then improve on evidence
- Launch with rollback available
- Rankings and AI citations monitored through the transition
- Calculator conversion tracked and tuned
- Further tools added based on what actually converts
Search & AI Visibility
Why the rebuild and the retainer belong together
A replatform is the cheapest time to fix visibility
The work that makes a site rank, and the work that makes AI engines cite it, is largely structural. Clean markup, sensible URLs, structured data describing what each page is, and content that directly answers the question being asked. Retrofitting all of that onto an existing site means touching every template twice. Doing it during a rebuild means doing it once.
One thing we will not claim
We are not going to tell you that AI engines cannot currently see your site, because we checked and they can. What we will say is that being readable is the floor, not the finish. Being the page that gives the clearest answer to a specific employer question is what gets cited, and that is a content and structure job rather than a crawling one.
Investment
The build, and the ongoing work that compounds
Two decisions, and they are separable
All figures exclude VAT.
Approximately 10 to 12 weeks
- Full rebuild on Next.js with headless CMS
- All existing content migrated, URLs preserved
- Homepage and key templates redesigned
- Three interactive calculators, built to be reused
- Editable rate table owned by your team
- Schema, llms.txt and technical SEO at build time
- Staging, UAT, redirect testing and rollback
- CMS training and documentation
Rolling, no lock-in, 4 to 6 months recommended
- Technical and on-page SEO
- AI visibility tracking and optimisation
- Content and tools targeting the 120,000 monthly searches mapped above
- New calculators added in priority order, highest volume and lowest difficulty first
- Monthly reporting against enquiries, not rankings
- Named team, direct access
Commercial terms
The retainer is rolling monthly with no lock-in and 30 days notice. We recommend a 4 to 6 month minimum to see compounding results. Invoicing in week 3, payable at the start of the following month. Delivered work is non-refundable. The replatform is invoiced 50% at kick-off and 50% at launch.
You already know how we work
“Saigon Digital transformed how Ski.com shows up online. Beyond rebuilding our platform, they helped us rethink our entire search and AI visibility strategy. We saw a significant uplift in organic traffic, our content started appearing in AI-generated recommendations, and the quality of inbound leads improved dramatically. They understand where digital is heading and how to turn it into real commercial results.”
Five questions we would want answered
These change the shape of the work, and two of them change whether it should happen at all. We would rather ask them than price around them.
- Does the Wirehouse brand have a defined future under WorkNest and Axiom GRC, and over what horizon? Wirehouse does not currently appear in the group’s published brand portfolio. If there is any prospect of the brand being folded in, we would weight the investment towards assets that transfer, meaning tools, content and rankings, and away from brand-led design spend. This is the first thing we would want to understand.
- Who holds the Netlify and WP Engine accounts, and is anyone else still in the loop on the current build?
- Publishing dropped to five posts across 2026. Was that a deliberate decision, a resourcing gap, or a pause after the acquisition?
- Is there appetite to publish pricing? Citation and BrightHR both do. Your genuine no auto-renewals, no lock-in position is the sharpest counter to Peninsula and Citation in this market, and right now it is buried in body copy rather than being a headline.
- The orphaned whitepapers and webinars: known issue, or an unfinished migration?
The site is healthy. That is exactly why now is the moment.
Replatforming a working website is a planned project on your timetable. Replatforming a broken one is an emergency on somebody else's.
Book the next conversation → Nick Rowe · CEO & Co-Founder, Saigon Digital · nick@saigon.digital