Rebuilding our own site
We rebuilt our own site as a WordPress-to-Astro conversion, the same service we sell, built to the same standards we ship to clients, so the site is the proof rather than the claim.
The challenge
A web studio's own site is the one that never gets finished. It's the cobbler's children: every paying project comes first, and the site that's meant to show what you can do quietly falls a year or two behind. Ours was a WordPress site that did the job, but it wasn't the showcase it ought to be.
It had two jobs to do at once, and they pulled in the same direction. The first was to say clearly what BrainWeb now is: a deliberately small north Norfolk studio working across the UK, organised around four pillars, Design, Build, Host, and Grow, building on two stacks, WordPress and modern static, with a real lean into work that's ready for AI search.
The second job was harder, and more interesting. The site had to *be* the proof, not just describe it. A studio that sells WordPress-to-Astro conversions and properly engineered, AI-readable builds cannot have a slow, dated, vulnerable site of its own. The site is the argument. If ours didn't hold up to inspection, nothing written on it would either.
And it had to sound like what BrainWeb actually is: a studio where you speak to the maker, not a faceless agency with a stock-photo team page. Honest about being small, rather than pretending otherwise.
The approach
We treated ourselves like a client. We scoped it properly, then ran our own WordPress-to-modern-static conversion, which is the exact service we offer. The old WordPress site became an Astro build with Payload CMS behind it, so the new site is a live, inspectable example of that conversion rather than a claim about one. To be clear, that wasn't a verdict on WordPress, which we still build on and recommend where it fits. It was the right fit for a content-led studio site where speed, security, and longevity matter most.
The build is static-first. Astro renders the pages to HTML at build time, served worldwide from Google's CDN on managed Firebase hosting. The result is fast, secure, cheap to run, and has very little surface to attack.
We built it to the same standards strip we ship to every client: Core Web Vitals tuning, WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility, GDPR-clean forms, SSL and security headers, no third-party trackers, privacy-respecting analytics, and self-hosted fonts and icons. The things we tell clients matter, done on our own site where anyone can check them.
AI-readability was a first principle, not an afterthought. Answer-first content structure, JSON-LD entity signals, and the AEO groundwork so the site can be cited by AI search tools, not only ranked by Google. This is where the studio's direction shows most plainly: building for the AI answer layer as well as the blue links.
The whole thing is version-controlled, with a preview deploy on every pull request and production going live on merge. The same discipline we'd hold any client build to, applied to our own.
The outcome
BrainWeb now has a site that argues its own case: a fast, secure, AI-readable Astro build that demonstrates the conversion service rather than describing it. A prospect weighing up WordPress against a modern static build can look at ours and see exactly what the second option gets them.
It's calm to run, too. Static hosting on Firebase, no sprawling plugin stack to patch every week, and no third-party trackers to account for. The studio's own site has stopped being a maintenance worry and started being a sales tool.
And it reads like what it is: a small studio where you talk to the person doing the work. No invented team, no overclaimed geography, no surprises.
*(Where there are real Core Web Vitals or Lighthouse figures worth showing, drop them in here. Better a true number than a vague boast, and better no number than an invented one.)*
Tech stack
Astro, Payload CMS, and TypeScript, statically generated and served from Google's CDN on managed Firebase hosting. Version-controlled on GitHub with an automated deploy pipeline: preview builds on every pull request, production on merge to main. Migrated from the previous WordPress site as a working example of our WordPress-to-modern-static conversion.
Founder note
"Every studio's own website is the project that never quite gets finished. Rebuilding ours properly, on the same stack and to the same standards we hold client work to, felt like the only honest way to sell it. If we're going to tell people their site should be fast, secure, and ready for AI search, ours had better be the proof."
Ric, Founder, BrainWeb
Closing
The cobbler's children finally have decent shoes, and you can inspect the stitching.
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