The Challenge: A Publishing Business on a Platform It Did Not Own
Michael Heppell is a UK bestselling author and keynote speaker (How to Be Brilliant, Flip It) with nine published books, hundreds of articles, and a readership that turns up to comment. His business runs on publishing and audience, so the website is a core commercial asset. It was running on Webflow, and it had quietly become a risk.
The content was not fully self-owned: images were served from an outside host. The members area and the form plumbing behind newsletter and enquiry signups depended on a chain of third-party connectors that were fragile and hard to reason about. And mobile performance was poor, with homepage largest-contentful-paint approaching ten seconds, slow enough to cost real engagement.
The Solution: A Self-Owned, Static-First Rebuild
We replatformed to a static-first Astro build on Vercel, pixel-faithful to the existing design and owned end to end.
Migration was the heart of it. We moved all 459 articles and 9 books into owned content collections, pulling every image local so nothing depends on an outside host. A near-empty sitemap became a complete 482-URL one, and 459 one-hop redirects preserve every legacy address so no ranking or backlink is lost at cutover.
Because the audience engagement mattered too much to lose, we built a bespoke comments system from scratch: email and consent identity, spam protection and rate limiting, no login, stored in a client-owned Neon Postgres database. We imported 2,932 approved historical comments, so years of conversation carried over intact.
The fragile pieces were replaced. The members area was retired as part of the rebuild. Newsletter, contact, and enquiry forms now run through owned server routes rather than a chain of external connectors, removing an entire class of silent-failure risk. Michael edits everything through a no-code visual CMS, so publishing needs no developer.
A full engineering pass finished it: WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility with zero axe-core violations, a complete structured-data and metadata layer, on-site search, and a mobile turnaround that lifted the homepage Lighthouse score from 61 to 91 and roughly halved largest-contentful-paint.
The Result
The rebuilt site is live in production on Astro and Vercel, with every URL preserved and the full content archive and audience carried across. Michael owns his content, his data, and his publishing workflow outright, on a stack built to stay fast as the archive keeps growing.
If your business runs on a platform that has become a constraint, let’s talk.