The Bellus home page hero: a Newcastle, Hunter Valley, Port Stephens and Central Coast strip, the 'Mobile Bridal Hair & Makeup' headline, a line of intro copy and Enquire Now and View Pricing buttons, over a black and white photograph of a bride and groom sitting against a fern wall.
01

BELLUS BRIDAL Hair & Makeup

ClientBellus Bridal Hair & Makeup
RoleMigration, design, build & SEO
ServicesFully custom · WordPress migration
Year2026
The brief

Amanda Frost has been doing bridal hair and makeup around Newcastle, the Hunter, Port Stephens and the Central Coast since 2007. The brief was a site that looked like the work, without giving up a single ranking on the way across.

The Bellus home page on a tablet propped on a warmly lit desk, beside a stylus and a pair of earbuds.

The problem

Nineteen years of search equity was sitting on WordPress and Elementor Pro, spread across 151 live URLs, and the home page alone was pulling 1,316 sessions a year. It was also slow: 56 on mobile in PageSpeed Insights. A rebuild that reads beautifully and loses the rankings is not a rebuild, it is a reset. Bridal is a twelve-month decision made off a shortlist, so the pages brides were already finding had to keep working from the first minute the new site answered.

The Bellus home page running at once on a laptop, a widescreen monitor, a tablet on a keyboard case and a phone, laid out on a white studio desk.
The Bellus home page on a phone in a stand beside a MacBook, against a black backdrop.

The move

We crawled the live site before we designed anything and made the URL map the spec. All 151 URLs kept their address, including four different suburb URL shapes that would have been tidier collapsed into one and would have cost real traffic to collapse. Then 158 pages in Astro on Cloudflare: 59 suburb pages, 33 wedding venue pages, 33 site pages and 24 blog posts, copy preserved page for page. DNS moved in two phases, so the site was never down and Amanda's email never dropped a message. On the same page and the same instrument the home page went from 56 to 95 on mobile and 91 to 100 on desktop, both medians of three PageSpeed runs, and accessibility, best practices and SEO read 100 on all 24. Those are lab numbers: the domain has only been live since 27 August, so there is no 28-day field data yet.

158Pages built
151Live URLs preserved
95Mobile PSI, was 56
The result
In their words
Highly recommend Newcastle Web Co! I recently partnered with them to build my new website, and the results have been incredible. Their team didn't just build a pretty site; they engineered it for local growth. The inclusion of custom SEO suburb and wedding venue pages has completely shifted my visibility in local search results. The site is lightning-fast, fully responsive, and was delivered exactly on schedule. If you want a digital partner that genuinely understands SEO and treats your business goals like their own, look no further than Newcastle Web Co!
Amanda FrostBellus Bridal Hair & Makeup5.0Google reviews
PageSpeed Insights report for bellus.com.au on mobile, 28 August 2026: Performance 95, Accessibility 100, Best Practices 100, SEO 100, and Agentic Browsing 3 out of 3. First Contentful Paint 1.8 seconds, Largest Contentful Paint 2.7 seconds, Total Blocking Time 40 milliseconds, Cumulative Layout Shift 0, Speed Index 2.8 seconds.
After launch, mobile95 in PageSpeed Insights, up from 56 on the same page. 100 for accessibility, best practices and SEO, and no layout shift at all.
After launch, desktop100 across all four categories, and 3/3 for agentic browsing: an AI agent can read the whole page. Nothing blocked the main thread at all.
PageSpeed Insights report for the old WordPress site on mobile, 27 August 2026: Performance 56, Accessibility 82, Best Practices 96, SEO 92, and Agentic Browsing 2 out of 3. First Contentful Paint 3.5 seconds, Largest Contentful Paint 7.8 seconds, Total Blocking Time 390 milliseconds, Speed Index 5.2 seconds.
The old site, mobile56 in PageSpeed Insights. The main image took 7.8 seconds to paint and the page blocked for 390 milliseconds.

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