Why we rebuilt an estate agent's website to look almost exactly the same

The old site worked for JW Wood's customers. People knew where things were, the brand was trusted, and it brought in valuations and viewings. Underneath, though, it was fragile. Properties reached it from Reapit, the CRM JW Wood run the agency on, through webhook flows that broke in ways nobody could see from the front end.

So the brief had two halves that pull against each other. Change everything underneath. Lose nothing on top.

We started the way most agencies would. We designed three new directions for the site, each a genuine attempt at something better looking and more modern. JW Wood turned all three down.

It would be easy to write that up as a client who didn't know what they wanted. It wasn't. They knew exactly what they wanted, and it wasn't a different website. Their customers had used the old one for years. A new look would have made them relearn it, and for what? A fresher feel isn't the same thing as a better site, and an estate agent's visitors aren't there to admire the design. They're there to find a house, book a valuation or ring a branch.

So we changed our approach. From September the live site became the brief. Every page was rebuilt against the original, with the same structure, the same content and the same running order. Each one was laid out as a design for JW Wood to sign off, built on placeholder data, and only then moved into the CMS. It's slower to describe and faster to agree, because nobody's arguing about taste.

Keeping the site familiar didn't mean keeping its problems. A handful of things changed because they were getting in people's way.

The old site grouped everything four ways, Buying, Selling, Renting and Letting, which was a good structure. But it hid all of it in a drawer behind a menu icon, even on a big desktop screen, so around thirty destinations were two clicks and a guess away. Those four groups now open as full-width panels from the header, with a fifth for the branches.

Branch pages put six panels behind a row of tabs, so opening hours and phone numbers, the two things most people come for, were hidden. On a phone the tabs ran far off the edge of the screen. Each branch page is now one page you scroll, with the hours and contact details kept in view.

The brand blue on the dark navy panels failed accessibility contrast checks, so we re-derived it until it passed while still reading as the same blue. Body text went up about 20% across the site. And on a property page, the Request a viewing button now stays within reach of your thumb on a phone.

This is where most of the real work went, and it's the part an estate agent feels most.

When a property comes off the market in Reapit, it should come off the website. On the old site it often didn't. The webhook flow failed on archive events, so properties archived in Reapit were never removed, and a misspelt filter meant some lettings were never fetched at all. On 20 October 2026 we counted 20 properties on the live site that had already left the market. Every one of them was an enquiry waiting to disappoint someone.

There was a quieter problem too. JW Wood tick No Internet Advertising in Reapit when a property shouldn't be advertised, for example when a vendor is away and can't host viewings. The old site never checked that tick.

We replaced the webhooks with our own sync. Every minute it asks Reapit what's changed and writes only real changes to the site. Every night at 03:00 it compares the whole site with Reapit and fixes any difference, which catches what the minute-by-minute check can't see, such as properties deleted or archived there. Properties with No Internet Advertising ticked stay off the site, whatever their status.

Two decisions made this much easier to live with. First, the rules about which properties appear are settings in the CMS, not lines of code, so JW Wood can see them and change them. Let Agreed lettings, for instance, come off after seven days. Second, every property that leaves the site has its reason recorded. When someone asks why a house isn't showing, there's an answer, not a shrug.

Buyers expect to search the way the big portals let them: draw a shape round the streets they want and see only what's inside it. The new site does that. Every matching property appears as a pin, grouped into counts when you're zoomed out and showing its price when you're zoomed in, and every other filter still applies inside the shape.

One detail worth knowing if you're commissioning this yourself: Google has deprecated the drawing library many map searches were built on. We used Terra Draw, the replacement Google itself points to, so the feature isn't built on something that's going away.

A rebuild that changes addresses can quietly throw away years of search rankings. Before launch we mapped every old address on the site, including hundreds of old blog posts and old search links, to its new home with a permanent redirect. Pages that genuinely no longer exist return a proper not found page rather than pretending, and the site now lives on www.jww.co.uk with one canonical address for every page.

None of this is visible when it works. All of it is very visible when it doesn't.

The property sync was the last big piece, built in a 48-hour launch sprint in late October. Since then we've added a page inside the CMS that shows, for each property, how often its page has been viewed against how many viewing requests it's had. It gives the branch teams something real to put in front of a vendor when the conversation turns to price.

It's early days for figures. Here's the fortnight after launch against the fortnight before, from the site's own analytics. Two weeks isn't long and autumn traffic moves around on its own, so we treat these as encouraging rather than proven, and we'll come back with enquiry figures once there's enough data to show them fairly.

If your customers like your website, you may not need a redesign. You may need a rebuild: the same site, on foundations that don't break. Those are different jobs, and it's worth being clear which one you're buying.

Ask any agency how they'll keep your site in step with your CRM, and what happens when a property comes off the market. If the answer is webhooks and nothing else, ask what catches the ones that fail.

Plan your redirects before launch, not after. By the time you notice the rankings have gone, they've gone.

And if your CRM provider's own website template does the job for you, that's often fine. A bespoke site earns its keep when you've outgrown the template, not before. If you're not sure which side of that line you're on, we're happy to talk it through, and to tell you if the honest answer is that you don't need us.