guttermachine.co.za: from WordPress to Astro on Cloudflare

The problem

Brink Gutter Supplies sells New Tech Machinery gutter machines through a one-page site at guttermachine.co.za. The site did one job: tell people about the machines and take enquiries.

Then a WordPress security update broke the contact form plugin. No error on the page, no warning in the inbox. The form simply stopped delivering enquiries.

That’s the WordPress trade-off in one sentence. You update to stay safe, and the update breaks something you rely on. For a one-page site with a single form, the plugin stack, PHP and database had become more risk than value.

What we built

We rebuilt the page on Astro and host it on Cloudflare Workers, the same stack we now use for every new client site. Three things changed, in the order they matter.

1. A refreshed design

The old site was a WordPress theme doing its best. The new one is designed for the job: a clear headline, the three promises Brink Gutter Supplies actually competes on (3-year warranty, 5-year buy-back, free training) right under the fold, the two machine ranges side by side with brochures, and one enquiry form. Same content, sharper story, and it reads as well on a phone on a building site as it does on a desktop.

2. A site that is simply fast

Astro ships almost no JavaScript, images are optimised at build time and the page is served as static HTML from the Cloudflare location closest to the visitor. Google’s PageSpeed Insights gives the result:

Speed isn’t vanity. Google uses these signals in ranking, and a page that loads in a blink is a page that gets an enquiry.

3. No WordPress overhead

There is no WordPress any more. No core, theme or plugin updates, and no testing after each one. No PHP hosting account, no database to back up, no admin login for anyone to attack, and no malware clean-ups. The client pays for a website that works, not for keeping a website alive.

The form, done properly

The form is what broke, so we didn’t just replace it. Every enquiry is written to a Cloudflare D1 database before anything else happens, so a full inbox or a broken notification no longer loses a lead. Brink Gutter Supplies reviews enquiries on a leads dashboard on their own domain, behind Cloudflare Access (Zero Trust), so the team signs in with their own accounts and nobody else gets a login page to attack. Cloudflare Turnstile checks that a real person is submitting, without a puzzle to solve, and bot submissions don’t get through. Domain, hosting, database and dashboard all live in the client’s own Cloudflare account. We manage it for them, but it belongs to them.

Is your site next?

If you run a small WordPress site that exists to bring in enquiries, and each update makes you nervous, this is the pattern we’d recommend. We keep your content and your Google rankings, redesign the page, and hand you a site that is faster, safer and cheaper to run.

Talk to us about your website. Happy to jump on a call to talk it through.