If you've visited the site before, you may notice things look a little tidier — new layout, sharper photos, and a few more nooks of information about what we get up to in the salon. What you can't see from the outside is that the whole thing has been rebuilt from the ground up. Same scruffies.co.uk, completely new engine room.
The old site had served us faithfully since 2014 on WordPress. It was a familiar workhorse, but over the years it had picked up plug-ins, theme add-ons, security updates and cobwebs in equal measure. Maintenance had quietly turned into a part-time hobby. So earlier this spring, I decided to take the lot apart and put it back together properly.
What's changed under the bonnet?
The new site is what's called a static site — a fancy name for "a few HTML files and a stylesheet, served straight to your browser." There's no database humming away, no admin login, no plug-ins to update at midnight. When you click a link, the page is already sitting there waiting for you. That's why everything should feel noticeably snappier than before.
Think of it like a magazine that's already been printed. With WordPress, every page was built fresh from a database the moment you visited — like asking the printer to run off a copy each time. Static sites print every page once, ahead of time, and just hand them over. Quicker for the reader, and a lot less to go wrong.
The site hosting has moved to Cloudflare Pages, which serves it from data centres dotted all over the world. Whichever city you're reading from, the page loads from a copy nearby. Best of all? It's completely free for a site this size — we'll happily take that win!
Why move away from WordPress?
WordPress is a brilliant tool, and for many businesses it's the right answer. But for a small grooming salon like ours, it had become overkill — a workshop full of power tools when all we needed was to keep a tidy noticeboard.
A few things had been niggling away for a while:
- Speed. The old site had picked up enough weight that some pages took several seconds to load on a phone with poor signal — and most of our customers find us on a phone.
- Maintenance. Updates needed checking, plug-ins broke each other, and the occasional spam comment had to be swept up.
- Subscription creep. Hosting itself was perfectly reasonable — but the page-builder licence and the static-site-export licence sitting on top of it had quietly added up year on year.
- Future-proofing. Plain HTML is going to keep working in twenty years' time. The same can't be confidently said of any specific WordPress theme.
It's the difference between owning a houseplant... and owning a hedge. The hedge is lovely, of course — but it does need a lot of trimming!
What this means for you
Honestly? Not very much — and that's rather the point. Pages load faster, the site sits more comfortably on a phone, and the contact form still drops your message into the same inbox it always did. The booking process is unchanged too: ring the salon, drop us an email, or send a message through the form.
The one place you will notice a difference is right here on this News page. The plan is to use it more often: short posts about goings-on at the salon, the occasional "before and after" story, and the odd note from me about the technical side of running a small grooming business in 2026. If that sounds interesting, do come back now and again.
Spotted something odd?
Website rebuilds are like grooming a long-haired German Shepherd — you find new tangles every day. If you spot a broken link, a wonky layout on your phone, or anything else that looks amiss, please drop us a line. The faster we hear about it, the faster we can sort it.
Thanks for reading — and thanks, as always, for being part of the Scruffies family.
John