Counselling & psychotherapy · Exeter & East Devon
Tash Thomas-Still Counselling
An integrative counselling practice in Exeter and East Devon. The old WordPress booking plugin kept breaking, so the whole site was rebuilt around a form that cannot fail quietly.
The challenge
The practice already had a WordPress site that presented it well. The problem was underneath: the enquiry form ran on a plugin that broke repeatedly, and when it broke it broke silently: the form appeared to send, and nothing arrived.
A form that fails quietly is worse than no form at all. With no form, someone picks up the phone. With a broken one, both sides believe the message went through. For a practice where the first contact is often the hardest step someone takes, that is the one failure mode worth engineering out entirely.
The brief was to keep the design and the words exactly as they were (they are the practitioner's own, and the tone is the service) and rebuild everything under them on something with no plugin layer left to break.
What we did
4 decisions that made the difference.
Same site, no plugin layer
Rebuilt in Astro, matching the existing design and keeping the copy verbatim. What went away is everything that could break on its own: no theme updates, no plugin stack, no database between a visitor and the page.
A way out on every page
Two things are present site-wide: a notice about device monitoring, and a Quick exit control that leaves for a neutral site immediately, also on a double press of Escape. They are part of the design rather than an add-on, and they are the reason the mobile screenshots show a green bar at the top and a green button bottom-right.
The distinctive service got its own page
Walk & Talk, therapy sessions held walking outdoors, is the offering that separates this practice from every other listing in the county, and it was a paragraph on the homepage. It now has a page built as a walk, with the route drawn as you scroll.
A booking form that cannot fail quietly
The enquiry form is four short steps, and it posts to a workflow that is not the website: the enquiry is delivered by a transactional email service and the sender gets an automatic acknowledgement. Tested end to end before sign-off. If the delivery path ever breaks, it breaks loudly.
The results
Measured, not estimated.
Lighthouse against the live site on 28 July 2026, three runs per device. These are the averages.
- Performance
- 100
- Performance
- 98
- Largest contentful paint
- 0.4s
- Cumulative layout shift
- 0.042
Lighthouse desktop, average of three runs
Lighthouse mobile, average of three runs
Desktop, against the live site
Desktop, against the live site
| Device | Performance | Accessibility | Best practices | SEO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Desktop | 100 | 97 | 100 | 100 |
| Mobile | 98 | 97 | 100 | 100 |
Every run kept as JSON and HTML, in caso-de-estudio-tash-counselling/. Ask and I will send them.
Built with Astro, self-hosted variable fonts, no client-side framework, static build served by Nginx on a Hostinger VPS.
Every site here is built the same way, without a page builder or a plugin stack: how I build websites.
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