Bespoke nine-page WordPress build for North West Lofts — a St Helens loft boarding, ladders, insulation and roof window specialist. Four services, four pages, hand-rolled sitemap, hardened install, and enquiry delivery configured to actually land.
North West Lofts is a loft specialist working out of St Helens, Merseyside, covering loft boarding, loft ladders, loft insulation and roof window installation across the North West.
The four services look related from the inside and are completely different from the outside. Somebody wants storage space, or easier access, or a lower heating bill, or daylight in a dark loft — four separate problems, four separate searches, four different times of year. Sold as one page of “loft services” they compete with each other and none of them ranks.
There was a second, less obvious requirement. This is a business that travels to customers, so it has no premises to publish — which most trade websites get wrong by listing a home address and confusing their own local signals. And like every small trade site, it would be scanned by bots from the day it launched, so it needed to be hardened before going live rather than after something happened.
Every Mako Digital case study includes a complete build specification — the actual technical decisions that made the project what it is.
Every Mako Digital build follows a documented approach — consistent across every project, calibrated to each client’s industry, brand, and customer journey.
Loft boarding, loft ladders, loft insulation and roof windows get bought by different people for different reasons — storage, access, energy bills, light. Each one has its own page with its own copy and its own Service schema, so a search for "loft insulation St Helens" lands somewhere written for that job rather than on a services page trying to cover all four at once.
This is a business that comes to you — there is no premises for a customer to visit, so publishing a street address would have been dishonest and would have confused the local schema. The build declares locality and region only, with an explicit service area across Merseyside and the North West. Google gets an accurate picture, and nobody turns up at a house expecting a showroom.
No SEO plugin, no page builder, no parent theme. Titles and meta descriptions are written per template rather than generated, WordPress's block CSS and emoji script are dequeued, feed links are dropped, and the sitemap is hand-rolled with core's own sitemaps switched off. The result is a page that ships only what it needs, on a site with four moving parts instead of forty.
A small trade site is a target precisely because nobody is watching it. This one ships with author enumeration blocked at both the rewrite and query level, the REST user endpoints closed so the admin username is not readable, XML-RPC disabled and the pingback header stripped, and a set of security headers applied at theme level. None of it is visible to a customer, all of it matters.
A trade website earns its money on the enquiry form, and the most common way that fails is silently — mail sent by the server, failing alignment, landing in spam. Here the form is hand-built with server-side validation and a postcode field so the survey can be scheduled, and delivery runs through FluentSMTP with the envelope sender aligned to SPF so messages survive the domain's DMARC quarantine policy instead of disappearing.
If we wouldn’t put it on our own business, we wouldn’t put it on yours.The Mako Digital Standard
North West Lofts Case Study: Mako Digital designed and built a bespoke nine-page WordPress website for North West Lofts, a loft boarding, loft ladder, insulation and roof window specialist based in St Helens, Merseyside. The build delivered a hand-coded theme with no page builder and no SEO plugin, a dedicated page and Service schema for each of the four services, correct service-area LocalBusiness markup, a hand-rolled sitemap and robots.txt, a hardened WordPress install, and enquiry delivery aligned to SPF under the domain's DMARC policy.
This is the build we point tradesmen, builders and home-improvement businesses at when they ask what a proper trade website looks like. See our web design for tradesmen page, web design in St Helens, or visit the case study archive for more examples.
A bespoke nine-page WordPress website for a St Helens loft specialist — loft boarding, loft ladders, loft insulation and roof windows, each with its own page and its own Service schema. Hand-coded theme with no page builder and no SEO plugin, a hand-rolled sitemap, a hardened WordPress install, and an enquiry form configured for reliable delivery.
Yes — it is one of the things we do most. Trade websites live or die on two things: being found for the specific job someone searched for, and the enquiry actually arriving. See our web design for tradesmen page, or web design for builders for the sector breakdown.
Because small sites are attacked automatically, not deliberately. Bots scan for exposed usernames, open XML-RPC endpoints and known plugin holes at scale, and a five-page trade site is as good a target as anything else. Blocking author enumeration, closing the REST user endpoints and disabling XML-RPC costs nothing at build time and removes the easy routes in. Doing it afterwards means doing it after something has happened.
Usually not, and North West Lofts is a good example. If you travel to customers rather than working from premises, publishing a home address invites callers to a house and muddles your local search signals. The right approach is a service-area business declaration — locality and region in the schema, with an explicit service area — which is exactly how this build is set up.
On a nine-page site a plugin sitemap is a lot of machinery for very little. WordPress core generates one that includes endpoints you do not want indexed, and SEO plugins add weight for features this site does not use. Writing it by hand means the sitemap contains exactly the nine URLs that matter, served correctly, with nothing to update or break.
One-page builds start from £449 and five-page builds from £999, with multi-service builds like this one priced on scope. Everything is hand-coded and yours outright — no monthly platform fee, no builder licence, no plugin subscriptions. See five-page website design for what is included.
Yes. Mako Digital is based in Wigan, ten minutes from St Helens, and works across Merseyside and the wider North West. See our St Helens web design page, or the full coverage map at /web-design-near-me/.
Yes. North West Lofts is a loft boarding, loft ladder, insulation and roof window specialist working across St Helens, Merseyside and the North West. The live site is at northwestlofts.co.uk.
If the North West Lofts build is the kind of work that fits your business, these are the closest peers in our portfolio — trade businesses, same hand-coded WordPress approach.
Multi-service trade builds from £999+. Same approach as the North West Lofts build — a page per service, correct local schema for how you actually trade, hardened at launch, and an enquiry form that reaches your inbox.
