Insurance Broker Website Rebuild | Falx Case Study

Insurance Broker Website Rebuild

The Challenge: A broker invisible to its own buyers

The client is a specialist UK insurance broker. It lives on being found, through mainstream searches and long-tail niches such as imported Japanese vehicles alike. Its WordPress estate was working against it.

The estate held 2,070 pages, each assembled on demand through database queries on every request. Caching plugins were plastered over the problem as a workaround rather than a fix. The homepage fired 52 separate requests to load, and 111 pages carried images over 100KB in unoptimised formats. Slow loads push quote-ready visitors to faster competitors. Lighthouse told the story: performance around 80, accessibility 57.

The audit found worse underneath. The build ran an outdated WordPress core (6.8.1) and Yoast SEO, with xmlrpc.php exposed to brute-force and DDoS abuse. A publicly readable theme error_log leaked internal structure, wp-cron.php sat within reach, and 461 pages had no Content-Security-Policy. Twenty page titles exceeded the pixel limit, so Google truncated them with keywords and brand cut off. The design itself was dated and failed modern accessibility standards.

Falx’s Approach: Static front end, headless content

Falx migrated the broker’s web presence to a static-first Astro application with a headless CMS behind it. Editors publish, the static site re-deploys, and WordPress exits the runtime entirely.

• Static front end, headless content. Astro pre-renders every route to HTML while Sanity holds pages, news, blog posts and campaign content.
• Structured content model. Policies, campaign pages and news are modelled as typed Sanity schemas, so every product route emits consistent, machine-readable markup.
• Worker-powered lead capture. Quote forms post to a Cloudflare Worker. That gives serverless form handling with no origin server to maintain.
• Performance budget from the start. Compiled Tailwind output, an AVIF-first image pipeline serving sized assets from the Sanity CDN, and subsetted self-hosted typography with nothing render-blocking in the critical path.
• Hardened delivery. Security headers, including the CSP missing on 461 pages, are applied at the edge on every response. The exposed xmlrpc.php, wp-cron.php and error log were eliminated along with WordPress itself.

The Results

• Lead generation. An average of 12 organic leads per day since launch. One long-tail specialist niche alone accounts for 24% of all site leads, so the rebuild captures the queries generalist brokers miss.
• AI search as a lead channel. 35% of leads arrive via ChatGPT recommendations and 30% via Google organic search. The structured, static build feeds both discovery surfaces in equal measure.
• Near-complete Lighthouse turnaround. The deployed build scores 99 for performance with 100 for accessibility, best practices and SEO. The starting point was roughly 80, 57, 92 and 92.
• Attack surface eliminated. There is no database, no PHP, no plugin surface and no version patching. The outdated core, the exposed xmlrpc.php, the readable error log and the missing CSP are gone entirely.

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