Worthington Homes: Headless WordPress Case Study
Worthington Homes
NUXT, WordPress, AWS
Headless WordPress, UX Design, Integrations
OVERVIEW
Since its founding in 2008, Worthington Homes has grown into one of Sydney’s premier residential construction companies. With a focus on client collaboration and distinctive design, Worthington prides itself on creating homes that reflect the colourful and diverse neighbourhoods of the Harbour City. Worthington Homes marries local expertise and industry experience with a person first, community centred ethos.
THE CHALLENGE
While addressing the immediate security concerns was the top priority, the incident also prompted a broader reassessment of Worthington’s broader online presence. It was clear the website had fallen behind those of its competitors due to its clunky design, poor responsiveness and lack of search engine optimisation.
Our challenge was simple: to re-imagine Worthington’s online infrastructure in a way that was accessible, high performing, secure and reflective of the values the company had been built upon.
UX-First Design
We found that Worthington’s person focused and community centered approach to home building was a perfect fit for our UX-first design ethos. Through empathy led decisions, signposted user journeys and an emphasis on functionality over flash, we were able to build a website on which users could find relevant information quickly and would be more likely to engage with for a longer period of time.
Every screen was meticulously designed with the user in mind and took into consideration everything from mobile responsiveness to page structure. By applying universal UX-first principles, asking the right questions and implementing our significant industry experience, we were able to provide Worthington with a state of the art, person-focused and future-proofed website.
Headless WordPress for Performance + Security
During our discovery sessions, Worthington expressed a strong preference to continue using WordPress due to the platform’s user-friendly interface and the internal team’s familiarity with it. However, as evidenced by the website’s recent breach, the service did not reach our security standards. In addition, re-imagining Worthington’s online infrastructure using WordPress alone would put an unnecessary ceiling on the website’s performance potential.
The path forward was clear: a decoupling of the front and back end operations by implementing a Headless WordPress solution.
By doing this, Worthington’s internal team could continue using WordPress as the content management system (CMS) while the rest of the website could develop past the service’s traditional theme system, with content being delivered via APIs to a modern frontend framework, in this case, NUXT (based on Vue.js).
This solution offers a range of significant benefits, including improved performance and load times, enhanced security by reducing exposure to common WordPress vulnerabilities, greater SEO capabilities, flexible, modern front-end design options, continued ease of content management for internal teams
In separating the CMS and customer-facing sections of Worthington’s online infrastructure, we were able to create a robust, future-proofed website that combined the intuitiveness of WordPress with a more sophisticated and secure front end.
Hosting on AWS for Scalability and Uptime
AWS provides a highly scalable infrastructure that supports fast load times, consistent uptime, and the flexibility to grow with the business. By leveraging AWS’s global network and enterprise-grade security protocols, we’ve created a hosting environment that delivers both high availability and peace of mind.
This strategic hosting choice ensures that Worthington’s new site remains fast, secure, and responsive, largely unaffected by traffic and prepared for future expansion.
THE RESULT
Our re-imagining of Worthington Homes’ online presence and infrastructure was not only meticulously designed, expertly applied, but also, an unequivocal success. Our UX-first approach to design, our decoupling of the website’s front and back end, as well as our decision to host the site on AWS have combined to ensure that the website now passes all metrics on Google Pagespeed for both mobile and desktop views.
Its metrics well surpass the recommended thresholds for optimal user experience, and features a 100% accessibility score for both mobile and desktop users.
100%
Accessibility
0.8s
First Contentful Paint (FCP)
1s
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
100
SEO
THE PROOF
Mage2 supported us through a complete website redevelopment, helping bring our designs to life and managing a smooth transition from our old site.
The team has been responsive and capable throughout, and we’ve had great feedback on the improved performance and design. We look forward to continuing to refine the site with them.
Liam Worthington
Managing Director
Worthington Homes