Case Study: The Loft Beauty Rooms

The Astra theme is used on over 1.5m websites, with good reason! It's lightweight, fast and compatible with a large number of page builders.

If you like to start building from templates it comes with a good sized library of starter templates too.

Working alongside the Astra theme, Beaver Builder, provides an ideal partnership for your development needs. It's intuitive drag and drop system gives you the flexibility to build a bespoke design from scratch or work from set templates.

We used the Powerpack add-on to provide a range of pre built modules. This add on covers most layouts and uses that the majority of website builders will need.

When it comes to form creators on Wordpress there are a number of well known names - Contact Form, Gravity Forms, for example. For our website we chose WP Forms. Having trialled a few we liked the easy to use user interface and range of add ons that could be required. It's not the cheapest on the market but it does have a wide range of uses beyond a standard contact form.

As with forms there are a number of caching plugins but WP Rocket is our go to. It's simple to configure and always provides the best caching options for any website we've used.

We've combined it with the Rocket CDN that is, again, simple to set up and implement with just a few clicks. Add in Asset Cleanup Pro and you have an unrivalled ability to optimise your site for rocket like performance. 

You can't run a Wordpress website without taking security seriously. With our support and maintenance package, that we offer clients, we use iThemes Security to manage the websites security.

2FA, brute force attacks as well as site monitoring for 404 hits, inactive users and file changes, mean we can be alerted to any activity that may indicate someone trying to attack our site. It's a real peace of mind plugin that we recommend to anyway serious about protecting their Wordpress site.

A recovery plan is not tempting fate it's common sense. Having a backup of your website means you can relax knowing if disaster strikes you will be back up and running in no time.

As a website company we rely on our website being operational to promote our work and attract potential clients so we can't afford to risk downtime. We use WPVivid Backup plugin as it provides the ability to make complete backups, incremental backups as well as rollback backups when updating plugins and themes. Add to that the ability to send to a range of external locations it means we can be confident that even if the server has a problem we have an external location for the sites backup.

As a bonus there's also an image optimisation tool and staging site add ons that gives us incredibly useful tools for our development processes.