When a practice outgrows its website
Change Accountants is a York-based, female-led general practice – well established at 12 years, the largest single-partner practice in the area, and growing. Stacey McVeighty acquired Sunley & Co in 2024 and has been folding it into Change, with new clients, more people, and a bigger office. But the old website hadn’t kept up, and was holding the practice back in the two places that really matter – bringing in the right clients, and bringing in good people to support them.
Cursive works to help financial and accountancy firms bring life to web platforms holding them back, without losing the authority sites have built over the years. When Change outgrew its website, we rebuilt a fresh, fast, flexible platform that made content easy to publish, read, and act on.
I wanted a site that, when a prospective employee or client looks at it, their first thought is ‘they look like the sort of team I want to work with’
TL;DR: The top takeaways
Saved a 10-year-old site (and security risk) at the end of its life
by migrating to a secure Wagtail platform on the same domain
Took the chore out of content management
with a ready-made library of templates to publish engaging, on-brand content
Set solid foundations to be found and cited by search and AI
all while preserving rankings, backlinks, and domain authority
The challenge: a good site that got old
This isn’t a big disaster story. Change’s old site had great innings, and did its job well. Built on Drupal about a decade ago, it usually sat in the top three for some of the practice’s core search terms. But time had caught up with it in more ways than one.
For Change’s director Stacey, website updates had become so brain-taxingly awkward that content creation had fallen off the to-do list completely. Search rankings were slipping as other firms published more. And underneath the site’s tank, the Drupal software it was built on had fallen out of support. That last one became a serious concern when we found malicious uploads on security audits.
Now, for an organisation that helps around 800 clients across Yorkshire keep their numbers in check, patching an unsupported platform was throwing good money after bad. Stacey knew that wasn’t logical. So we worked closely to look at the most practical, sustainable options instead.
As an accountant, I know from my own clients: if something isn’t quick or simple, it goes to the bottom of the list, and further down, until it drops off the bottom never to be seen again. That’s what our old site had become.
The solution: a rebuild for ease, security, and action
We started with what the website needed to achieve. For Change Accountants, that came down to two kinds of growth:
- Bring in more of the right clients, through search, through AI, and by giving word-of-mouth a strong place to land – all built around what sets the practice apart: female-led, long-established, and reassuringly personal, with everyone under one roof in York rather than shipping work offshore.
- Bring in more of the right people, because recruiting talent is hard and can take months. Change is a truly great company to work for – unlimited holidays, flexible hours, part-time roles for parents returning to work, a gorgeously green farm location. The site needed to express this and inspire candidates to apply.
What we did, and how it helped
A content plan ready to be found, not just filled
Change’s site had gone full Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors on us – it needed feeding, with content, fast. But not just content for content’s sake. We got under the skin of the practice – what Change offers, the clients and sectors it’s strongest with, what the competition down the road is doing, and the personality that makes the firm unmistakably Change. From there we built a content strategy designed for both people and search engines: structure, pages, clusters, features, internal links, and a content calendar all planned around the terms we want to rank for, with dedicated landing pages for key sectors on the way.
Standing out from the blue and beige
Accountancy doesn’t hand you much to work with visually, so we crafted fresh designs around the brand Change already had. Built around a growth-curve motif – those bold, blocky, rounded shapes across the site – with a broader colour palette and bespoke icons, the new visual language stands out from standard-issue accountant websites (corporate blue, sad graphs, you know the sort).
Putting good people front and centre
Change’s team is real, local, and reachable – so people lead the site. We commissioned Claire Wood to build a proper photo library of the team, and used it throughout, including a set of “greeting” images on the service pages: a friendly face alongside a fixed-fee-quote prompt, working as a gentle but vibrant nudge halfway down the page. There’s a whole bank of them, flippable left to right, so no two pages feel the same and Stacey can spin up a new one from the library without it ever looking copy-pasted.
I love that my team are front and centre on the new site. The rest of the site is clean, clear, friendly and pushes all the focus onto the team, via photos and insights - which was exactly the brief.
Making engaging content simple for the team to publish
Updating the old platform was a faff, so naturally, nobody did it. We built the new one in Wagtail CMS and filled it with accessible, mobile-friendly templates that fit the content – not the other way round. Stacey can now easily add pages, images, and forms, refreshing articles whenever she pleases – no ticket to us for routine changes, and no painful 10-minute hunt for a good photo when there’s a lovely library to pull from.
Built to be read by AI, not just Google
The old site was almost invisible to robots. It had zero structured data and no schema, which, if you don’t speak fluent SEO nerdery, means search engines and AI assistants looked at the pages and left empty-handed. The new one fixes that by spoon-feeding a proper entity graph to the machines – the practice marked up as an accounting service, the apprenticeship as a work-based programme, the ’how to change accountants’ guide as a how-to and FAQ – so tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI answers can quickly read and suggest Change Accountants.
Giving trust signals the platform they deserve
The practice’s five-star Google reviews don’t sit in a dark, dusty corner of the internet. They now surface on the site, linked through to the official Google Business Profile and encoded right into the schema – verifiable rather than decorative. We applied the same approach to insight articles. Blogs are now tied to on-site author profiles and LinkedIn – real, human authorship signals that build the experience-and-trust footprint search and AI engines crave.
Ongoing digital care and monitoring
Part of Change’s charm is that you’re not passed around like a hot potato – the same York-based team looks after you, year after year. We operate on the exact same wavelength: we don’t just launch a website and wish you luck. For this platform partnership, we rebuilt the site analytics on GA4 and now provide continuous weekly monitoring covering search, SEO, technical health, and carbon. Every Friday there’s a clear picture of what’s working and a shared to-do list for Stacey’s team and our developers.
What changed
It’s early days, but we’re already winning. The sweetest proof of life came from the new apprenticeship page we built. Within 72 hours of going live, an applicant found it and used it. Finding good staff is one of the most painful, time-consuming parts of growing an accounting firm, so the new platform is instantly pulling its weight.
Crucially, no rankings were harmed in the migration of this site – domain authority, backlinks, and referring domains all made it safely across the border – which isn’t always a reality for platform rebuilds. Under the hood, the new site is loads cleaner: old URLs are properly redirected to their new homes, and a massive pile of dead, broken digital junk has been swept out of Google’s index.
What was once a clunky, dated site with security holes is now a fast, secure, on-brand platform that Stacey and the team can update themselves without needing an engineering degree. Digital foundations are laid properly and pointed the right way: ready to be picked up by traditional search and AI crawlers as traffic builds. Best of all, because we’re measuring the data every week, future growth will be backed up by cold, hard numbers rather than blind faith and vibes.
What we learned
The temptation with a rebuild is to make it about the new shiny thing you’re building. Of course that’s important, but we also wanted to protect everything the old site had earned over 10 years – things like rankings, links, and trust. Everything was meticulously done to carry Change’s platform without a scratch, creating something visually delightful that Stacey and the team could update without hiccups or delays – and importantly, don’t have to replace again in the future.
