Case Study - La Villa de Mazamet
Introduction
Montagne Noire Web Studio recently completed the complete transformation of La Villa de Mazamet’s website, a luxury guesthouse located in Tarn, Occitania. This exceptional property, nestled at the foot of Montagne Noire, was previously offering a digital experience completely misaligned with the quality of its services.
The challenge was significant: migrate a WordPress site with an outdated design, time-consuming maintenance, sub-standard performaces, and poorly adapted to the modern needs of the tourism sector, towards a high-performance, hand-coded solution developed with Astro with 100% delegated maintenance and management. Let’s get to work!
Project Objectives
Facing the challenges of an increasingly competitive tourism market, the new website’s objectives were ambitious:
- Create an immersive user experience that reflects the villa’s standing
- Develop an ultra-performant platform adapted to online booking behaviors
- Drastically improve technical performance and code quality to boost SEO
- Refresh the visual identity while preserving the brand’s distinctive elements
Discovery Phase and Technical Audit
The first step consisted of a thorough audit of the existing site to identify major friction points. Several critical problems were highlighted:
Identified Problems
- Degraded performance: heavy plugins and unoptimized code
- Security vulnerabilities: large attack surface; hackers love WordPress
- Time-consuming maintenance: constant updates and conflicts
- Integration limitations: difficulties with business tools
- Outdated, unresponsive design: negative impact on User Experience
Benefits of Custom Development
The transition to Astro structurally solved these problems:
- Clean code: architecture optimized for speed and SEO
- Enhanced security: virtually zero attack surface
- Simplified maintenance: automated and stable deployment
- Smooth integrations: modern and flexible APIs
- Modern, responsive design: mobile-friendly and vibrant
Limitations of the Old WordPress Site
The original site exhibited all the symptoms of a WordPress solution poorly adapted to modern web challenges, with loading times exceeding 4 seconds, frustrating mobile navigation, and non-compliance with GDPR and accessibility standards. Added to this was time-consuming maintenance: conflicting plugin updates, emergency security patches, and recurring incompatibilities that required several hours per month—time lost that couldn’t be dedicated to business development.
This critical situation motivated a complete redesign, abandoning WordPress for a modern and performant hand-coded approach.
Design Phase: Modernizing While Preserving Identity
The design phase was conducted with a clear objective: modernize the user experience while respecting the historical identity of this inter-war villa.
Preserving Visual Identity
The design began with an in-depth analysis of existing identity elements. The original logo, with its motif present on the wrought iron gates of the house, was slightly modified. However, the color palette underwent a meticulous revision to reconcile modernity and accessibility. Indeed, they lacked brightness and didn’t meet the contrast standards necessary to achieve WCAG 2.1 AA level.
Prototyping with Figma
The design process relied on Figma for efficient and collaborative prototyping. This methodical approach allowed for quick validation of design directions with the client, who accepted the mockup without any revisions!
Design methodology:
- Initial wireframes to define information architecture
- High-fidelity prototypes integrating preserved identity
- Real-time contrast accessibility testing
- Responsive mockups for all device types
Visual Transformation and User Experience
The new design prioritizes immersion and conversion. The streamlined interface highlights the villa’s assets while naturally guiding towards booking:
Design improvements:
- Modern and immersive interface
- Optimized high-definition photo gallery
- Intuitive and smooth booking journey
- Visual consistency across the entire site
- Enhanced accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA level)
Development Phase: Performance and Business Integrations
Once content migration was completed, development focused on two strategic axes: performance optimization and integration of features outlines in the specifications.
Technical Performance
The transformation is spectacular. The transition from bloated WordPress to a hand-coded website achieved perfect Lighthouse scores, directly correlated with improved SEO, user experience, and conversions. See for yourself:
Improvement metrics:
- Performance: +16.28% (from 86 to 100)
- Accessibility: +6.38% (from 94 to 100)
- Loading time: -73.68% (from 3.8s to 1s)
Integrated Blog System Without WordPress
Villa de Mazamet’s site had a blog regularly updated by the owners. We were of course able to integrate this essential functionality for SEO and visitor engagement using an open-source content management system called Decap CMS. The client accesses a custom graphical interface, simpler and more intuitive than WordPress, and creates and edits blogs in complete autonomy.
This custom interface allows category creation, content management in two languages (French and English), uploading images via an integrated media library — everything is possible! The owners can publish their articles on regional discoveries, visit advice, or seasonal news without any technical knowledge.
This solution demonstrates that it’s perfectly possible to reproduce WordPress’s useful functionalities while eliminating its complexity and vulnerabilities. The client benefits from a modern, secure publishing tool perfectly integrated into their site.
SEO Excellence and Enhanced Visibility
The transition to Astro and code performance revolutionized the site’s SEO performance by enabling native implementation of best practices. Core Web Vitals now display all their indicators in green, a crucial ranking factor for Google. The semantic and accessible HTML5 structure facilitates indexing by search engines, while Schema.org structured data specific to tourist accommodations enriches display in search results.
Although the new site has only been online for 3 months at the time of writing, this technical optimization is already translating into concrete results. Organic traffic has increased by approximately 50% over three months, impressions in Google results have jumped by 94%, providing considerably expanded visibility.
Operational Simplification and Scalability
Beyond technical performance, this migration transformed the client’s relationship with their website. Villa de Mazamet’s owners entrusted us with complete technical management: maintenance, updates, and support. This complete outsourcing totally frees the owners from technical concerns that previously required several hours monthly.
Concretely, the client now has no technical tasks to manage. Gone are the stressful WordPress updates, plugin conflicts to resolve, or unpredictable crashes to handle urgently. The owners can focus exclusively on their core business: hospitality and customer satisfaction.
Conclusion: A Successful Migration with Tangible Benefits
The Villa de Mazamet project concretely illustrates the benefits of a strategic migration from WordPress to a hand-coded website.
Many small businesses remain prisoners of obsolete WordPress sites that hinder their growth. Yet, migration to a hand-coded solution offers measurable gains that far exceed the initial investment.
And our client is delighted to have taken the leap:
Thank you to Montagne Noire Web Studio for the superb work done on our website. We had a WordPress site that we wanted to get rid of, and Geoffrey created a superb, custom-designed and coded website for us. We are very happy that we no longer have to manage WordPress and, above all, that we have seen a 50% increase in clicks on our site since it went live. Even our customers are impressed by the quality of the site! We therefore highly recommend Geoffrey and Montagne Noire Web Studio for all your website creation and SEO needs!
- La Villa de Mazamet
For small businesses still dependent on WordPress, the question is no longer whether migration is necessary, but when it will happen. Those who take the leap today gain a decisive competitive advantage.
