WestEnd.com WordPress to Astro Rebuild

Client Overview

• Client Name: WestEnd.com
• Industry: Theatre and Ticketing
• Website URL: westend.com

WestEnd.com has sold London theatre tickets since 2015. The site lists shows across musicals, plays, comedy, family, concerts, and stars on stage, alongside venue guides and editorial coverage of the West End.

Challenge

The old site ran on WordPress with the Avada theme. Content lived inside page-builder blocks, which made the structure hard to reuse and the pages slow to load. Show details, venue information, and editorial posts were not modelled as proper data, so keeping them consistent took manual work.

WestEnd.com needed a faster site, a cleaner content model, and an editing workflow the team could run themselves without breaking layouts or waiting on a developer.

Project Goals

• Move off WordPress to a fast static stack without losing existing content or search rankings.
• Model shows, venues, and posts as structured content that drives reusable page templates.
• Give the team a simple editing interface for day-to-day updates.
• Automate builds and deployment so publishing is hands-off and safe.

Process and Development

1. Content migration: Pulled the existing posts and content out of WordPress, including the body copy trapped inside Avada blocks, and remapped the old categories and URLs onto the new structure.
2. Structured content model: Rebuilt the site in Astro with content collections for shows, venues, and blog posts, each with its own schema for ticketing, cast, reviews, images, and SEO.
3. Client CMS: Configured Pages CMS so the team edits everything through a web interface that commits straight to the repository.
4. Automated deployment: Set up a GitHub Actions pipeline that builds the site, optimises images, indexes search, and deploys to Bunny CDN across separate staging and production environments.

Solutions Delivered

• A static Astro site that pre-renders every page and serves from Bunny’s global edge network.
• Structured collections covering more than 50 shows and over 40 London venues, with JSON-LD schema for shows, venues, and FAQs.
• Pages CMS editing for shows, venues, posts, pages, navigation, and settings, with image uploads handled in the same interface.
• A staging branch for review and a one-step path to production, with incremental uploads and cache purging so deploys take seconds.
• Full-text search built at deploy time with Pagefind, so it needs no database or server.

Results

• A much faster site, with WebP images and pre-rendered HTML replacing the old page-builder pages.
• The team now adds shows, updates prices, uploads photos, and publishes posts on their own, with every change tracked in version control.
• Editing on staging and merging to production gives a clear, low-risk publishing flow.
• Hosting is simpler and cheaper, with no WordPress server or plugins to maintain.

Conclusion

The rebuild gave WestEnd.com a site that is quick for visitors and straightforward for the team to run. Structured content, a friendly CMS, and an automated pipeline mean updates go live without a developer in the loop, which was the point of the project.

Client testimonial

Fantastic, thank you. The new site is different class, such a massive improvement from my existing website.

Christian , Owner, WestEnd.com