Stafford House
The reputation was already there. The website was a decade behind it.
British Council accredited. Three campuses in London, Cambridge and Canterbury. Genuinely premium. Agent-recommended. And invisible to AI search.
Stafford House International had built something real. Running English language programmes for over 70 years, it is the kind of school that earns loyalty as much as enrolments. What it hadn’t done was let the internet know.
Brief
When a prospective student searches for an English language school today, the website is the audition. Agents make recommendations based on it. Parents form judgements from it. And increasingly, AI search tools decide whether a school is worth surfacing at all. Get it wrong and the first impression a prospective student forms, often before they’ve spoken to anyone, is shaped by something that no longer reflects what the school actually is.
Stafford House’s site was close to a decade old. It had stopped appearing in Google AI summaries entirely. The school had continued to invest in its product, its teaching, its campuses, its student experience. Its digital presence hadn’t kept pace with any of it.
The audience made this harder still. Over 200 pages, many nested, duplicated or simply out of date, were burying the brand rather than building it. International students navigating content in their second language. B2B agents using the site alongside the students they were advising. A CELTA teacher training strand with its own identity and separate needs. Internal staff who had to rely on a developer for every content update. One architecture had to work for all of them, and getting it right was a substantial undertaking before a line of copy had been written.
This wasn’t a cosmetic problem.
A school with genuine competitive advantage was invisible where it mattered most.
The brief said rebuild. We started somewhere more fundamental.
Stafford House had been considering WordPress Elementor as the page builder. We worked through the options properly with the team and arrived at a different answer: a custom WordPress theme built on native Gutenberg blocks. This gives the internal team the ability to build on-brand pages with ease and consistency, without the overhead, complexity and bloat that come with theme builders. The result is cleaner code, stronger SEO foundations and a faster, leaner site that is well placed to perform as search becomes increasingly AI driven. The right decision for the next ten years, not just the next twelve months.
Before a single design decision was made, we ran structured workshops with stakeholders across marketing, sales, CELTA and operations, working through what each team actually needed rather than processing requirements in sequence.
The information architecture phase rationalised 200-plus pages into a clear hierarchy built around courses, locations and student experience.
Anchor navigation and sticky course actions on key pages made long-form content manageable for users reading in their second language.
The work that changes things most is often the work nobody asked for.
One feature was never in the brief. During the project we noticed the team managing accommodation availability across multiple spreadsheets in multiple locations. We identified it, built a CMS feature that consolidated everything into one place, and it’s now the only place Stafford House manages that data.
The results
A fast, fully custom WordPress site built around every audience Stafford House serves. Clean architecture, flexible content blocks, a CMS the internal team manages independently, and a digital presence that finally reflects the quality of what the school offers.
I think you hit a great balance between flexibility on content creation and branded style.
Commented Sasha Ryzhov (Digital Marketing Manager at CATS Global Schools) after the CMS training session
Wow, so happy to get to this point. Thanks a lot for the hard work and making this happen. First real lead has already been received in our CRM. So excited.
Commented Gabriel Pascual (Marketing & Sales Director at Stafford House) on launch day
A school that’d spent years as its sector’s best kept secret now has the discoverability to match its distinctiveness.
Within weeks, Stafford House commissioned a second site for the Study Holidays project, built directly on the International site as its foundation.
