Challenge
An accounting, tax, and consulting firm serves medical and dental practice owners, from solo practitioners to multi-location groups. Its website is where those owners land before booking a consultation. The creative team had a finished design and approved copy, and needed the site built.
The existing site was an off-the-shelf theme driven by Elementor. All of its pages lived inside the builder, so building the new design would have meant recreating each one, panel by panel, in the same tool, on a site whose homepage scored 82 out of 100 for mobile performance.
The firm’s team also needed to edit pages themselves after launch, without a developer in the loop for routine copy changes. Building the redesign on the same foundation would have locked the new look into the builder’s licensing and overhead for years.
Solution
84EM built a custom WordPress block theme from scratch and retired the page builder. The theme runs on standard WordPress with none of the builder’s excess code, licensing, or lock-in, so pages load faster and there is less to maintain.
Two pages went live at launch, each rebuilt section by section against the new design at desktop and mobile widths. When the design requirements changed partway through the build, the theme was updated to match the same day.
Almost every section of the site is a standard WordPress block, so the firm’s team edits headings, copy, images, and calls to action directly on the page. Only two purpose-built blocks were needed: a slider for the firm’s three service pillars, and the embed for its existing consultation form, which stayed at the same address on the page so existing links to it still work.
A staging copy went to the firm’s team for review four days after the brief arrived. Client feedback ran through the following week, and the site went live on 2026-08-14. Two more pages, About and Resources, were built and held out of the menu until the firm has content for them.
Key Capabilities
- No page builder. The design lives in the theme, so there is no builder license to renew and any WordPress developer can pick it up.
- Editable on the page. Copy, images, headings, and buttons are standard blocks the firm’s team changes directly, with the layout holding no matter who makes the edit.
- One place to change the brand. Colors, type, and spacing are set once, so a future palette or typeface change is a single edit.
- Consultation form untouched. The firm’s existing form runs exactly as before, at the same address, so nothing pointing at it had to change.
- Built to accessibility standards. All color pairings in the design pass contrast requirements, and menus, buttons, and controls can all be reached and operated from the keyboard.
Results
Mobile performance went from 82 on the old site to 95 on the first staging build, before any tuning. A tuning pass before launch took the score to 100 in local testing, and the homepage now weighs under 200 kilobytes.
Brief to launch took eleven days, 2026-08-03 to 2026-08-14, including a mid-build design revision and client feedback rounds on staging.
Every page on the old site ran through the page builder and its paid add-on. Neither is installed now, and the unused plugins the old site had accumulated are gone as well.
The firm’s team now edits pages themselves, without a developer. When the About and Resources content is ready, they publish those pages on their own.
