Steve runs a No Win, No Fee practice for cyclists and motorcyclists injured on the road. Before we got involved, his business was represented online by a single-page WordPress site he didn't have proper control over. That's not a small problem for a legal practice. When your website is the first thing an injured rider sees after a crash, it needs to load fast, work everywhere, and say only what's true.
We took on the full rebuild of cycleclaimsdirect.com, starting by capturing everything on the old site before touching a line of code, then rebuilding from scratch in plain PHP. No framework, no database, no build step. Just a site that does exactly what it needs to do and nothing it doesn't.
Why We Stripped Out the Framework
A lot of small legal and service sites are built on WordPress because it's quick to set up. The trade-off is that quick-to-set-up often becomes slow-to-load, hard-to-secure and awkward-to-hand-over once a plugin or theme licence lapses. Steve had inherited exactly that situation: a site he couldn't meaningfully edit or control.
Plain PHP isn't a fashionable choice, but for a site like this it's the right one. There's no plugin ecosystem to patch, no database to secure, no build pipeline to maintain. Steve now owns the code outright, and any developer can open it and understand it.
The Numbers Behind the Speed
We don't think speed claims mean much without the figures attached, so here they are. Combined CSS and JavaScript dropped from 578,916 bytes to 36,197, a reduction of well over 90%. The hero image, previously a 272KB JPEG, now loads at 33KB on a phone.
Third-party origins went from four down to zero. Google Fonts, two CDN-hosted scripts and an external icon kit have all been removed. The typeface is self-hosted as a single 32KB file, and every icon is inlined directly into the page. That means no external requests slowing down the first paint, and no third party quietly tracking visitors to a personal injury enquiry page, which matters more here than on most sites.
Why Consistency Matters More Than Speed on a Claims Site
Speed is the part that's easy to show with a before-and-after screenshot. The part that actually protects Steve's practice is less visible: every enquiry form on the site now comes from a single shared component.
That sounds like a small technical decision, but it has a real consequence. We can say with confidence that all six forms on the site carry the same spam traps, the same CSRF token and the same delivery address, because they're built from one source rather than six separate hand-coded forms that might quietly drift out of sync over time. On a site whose entire purpose is capturing enquiries from people who've just been in a crash, that consistency is the difference between a lead reaching Steve and one disappearing into a broken form nobody noticed.
We also added a proper cookie banner and the privacy, cookies, terms and complaints pages that didn't exist on the old site. For a No Win, No Fee legal practice, those pages aren't decoration. They're part of doing the job properly.
Accessibility and Honesty in the Legal Detail
We measured contrast across 2,642 text elements at both desktop and phone widths and fixed every genuine failure we found. That's not a box-ticking exercise; if someone reading about a claim after an accident can't read the text clearly, the site has already failed at its one job.
The old site had no company number and no regulatory detail published anywhere. Rather than inventing something to fill that gap, the new site prints nothing. An empty legal claim is worse than a missing one, and for a practice built on trust between riders, that distinction matters.
A Site That Behaves Itself
Cycle Claims Direct exists to help riders helping riders, and the site now reflects that properly: fast, honest about what it can and can't say, and built on infrastructure Steve actually controls.
If a website is quietly working against a business, whether that's speed, security, accessibility or simply not owning the code behind it, it's worth having someone look properly rather than patching around the symptoms. We do this kind of rebuild regularly across sectors that depend on trust as much as design, and if that sounds like a conversation worth having, get in touch and book a call.
