Project Summary
Country House Weddings is a family run business, that has been creating dream weddings for over 30 years, with their stunning country house venues.
Impact Media has supported all of the Country House Wedding’s sites for many years, and we’ve added a couple of venue sites to the collection in that time. In 2025, to celebrate their 30 years in business, Country House Weddings selected Impact Media to redesign their main company website.
We delivered a full redesign and rebuild, replacing their outdated website with a stunning, modern, and user friendly site.
The Challenge
Country House Weddings came to Impact Media in 2018 with a network of six distinct wedding venues across southern England. Each venue had its own website, but they were missing something crucial: a central destination that could capture searches for wedding styles rather than just venue names.
Their existing holding website was built on WordPress Classic Editor with a heavily customised Advanced Custom Fields backend. While functional, it wasn’t serving as an effective content hub or lead generation tool. It presented two significant problems:
For users: The site acted as little more than a brochure. Visitors couldn’t filter venues by capacity, accommodation, or style. Key information was hidden behind hover states (which don’t work on mobile). Worst of all, clicking on a venue immediately took users away to that venue’s individual website, meaning Country House Weddings lost the opportunity to cross-promote alternatives.
For the team: The marketing team couldn’t build pages themselves. Every content update needed developer intervention. There was no way to capture trending searches like “intimate weddings,” “autumn weddings,” or “twilight weddings.” If someone was searching for a castle wedding but Clearwell Castle wasn’t quite right, there was no way to suggest Lee’s Priory as an alternative manor house option.
Our Solution
We rebuilt the site from the ground up with three key goals:
Create a discovery engine for wedding styles, not just venues
We introduced custom post types for Venues, Locations, and Wedding Styles. This meant Country House Weddings could now rank for searches around wedding types (seasonal weddings, intimate celebrations, exclusive venue hire) as well as venue-specific searches.
Keep users on the site longer to explore alternatives
Rather than immediately redirecting visitors to individual venue sites, we created rich venue pages within the Country House Weddings ecosystem. Each venue page shows capacity, accommodation options, venue style (castle, barn, manor house, orangery, deer park), and location, with prominent calls to action for enquiries.
Empower the marketing team to manage content independently
We built 17 flexible content blocks that give the team complete control over page layouts. They can now create landing pages, seasonal campaigns, and promotional content without waiting for developer support.
Before The Rebuild
- Homepage showed no venue information until hover (unusable on mobile)
- No photos visible without interaction
- Limited venue details (capacity, accommodation not displayed)
- Clicking any venue immediately redirected users away from the site
- No cross-promotion between venues
- Content difficult to skim (no headings, poor structure)
- Content difficult to skim (no headings, poor structure)
- Auto-play videos (competitor standard, but user-hostile)
- Cluttered award logos
- Key navigation hidden on mobile
- Poor text contrast (accessibility issue)
- Real weddings buried in generic news section
- Limited photo galleries on venue pages
After The Rebuild
- All key information visible immediately
- Rich photo galleries on every page
- Clear stats for capacity, accommodation, venue style
- Users stay on Country House Weddings site to explore options
- Strategic cross-promotion throughout user journey
- Well-structured content with clear headings
- No intrusive auto-play content
- Clean, focused design
- Priority navigation visible on mobile
- Full accessibility compliance
- Dedicated section for real weddings
- Content difficult to skim (no headings, poor structure)
- Extensive photo galleries showcasing each venue
Custom Post Types & Filtering
- Venues: Hybrid pages combining fixed information (capacity, accommodation, key features) with flexible block layouts for customisation
- Locations: Geographic landing pages that group venues and help with local SEO
- Wedding Styles: Pages for seasonal weddings, intimate celebrations, and other trending wedding types
The venues archive page includes filtering by:
- Venue type
- Capacity ranges
- Accommodation
- Location
Design System & Styleguide
We created a design system and style guide for all UI across the site including forms, calls to action, and image aspect ratios, to ensure consistency across the pages.
19 Page Templates
We created dedicated layouts for every content type: venue archives, individual venues, location pages, wedding style pages, seasonal campaigns, offers, events, news, blog, search results, and contact pages.
Each template uses flexible blocks to give the team maximum control.
Technical Delivery
- Mobile-first responsive design (with optimised tablet experience)
- WCAG 2.1 A accessibility compliance
- Custom page loading transitions for a polished feel
- Integration with ClickDimensions for lead capture
- Gravity Forms for enquiries
- Advanced Custom Fields for structured content
- Yoast for easy on-page optimisation
- Full content migration from the legacy site
- Comprehensive training videos
- Extensive testing/QA
- Analytics/conversion tracking
- Redirects
- Image compression
We have a rigorous security setup, including Cloudflare’s WAF, realtime scans, virtual patching/hardening, DDoS mitigation, DDoS prevention, two-factor, and more.
The site scores an A in GTMetrix with strong Core Web Vitals scores:
Future Planning
The immediate goal was to create a discovery hub, but we also planned for the future. This website was designed to become the ‘north star’ for a potential redesign of all 6 venue websites.
The architecture we built allows for these venues to be brought into a WordPress multisite installation, with the CHW site serving as the parent theme.
- The flexible block system we created
- The venue, location, and wedding style post types
- The accessibility and performance standards established
- The mobile-first responsive framework
- The consistent design language and UX
Instead of maintaining 7 separate websites the entire network would share a common foundation.
Updates, improvements and new features developed for one site could be rolled out across all, while still allowing each venue to maintain its unique brand identity and content.
The groundwork laid in this project positions Country House Weddings to scale their web presence efficiently as their venue network grows.
For the Country House Weddings team, this structure would mean:
- Consistent training across teams
- Shared template library and flexible blocks
- More efficient content management
- Easier cross-promotion between venues
- One technical stack instead of 7 disparate systems
The Impact
In the month after the launch, the analytics are showing very positive results. Engagement time, engaged sessions and events per session are up considerably, as are overall sessions.
The feedback from the Country House Weddings team has been incredibly positive, with future projects already in motion.
For Users
- Clear venue information visible at a glance (no more hunting for capacity or accommodation details)
- Ability to filter and compare venues side by side
- Discovery paths for different wedding styles and seasons
- Consistent experience across mobile and desktop
- Faster page loads and smoother navigation
For Their Team
- Complete content control through flexible blocks
- No developer dependency for page creation or updates
- Ability to respond quickly to wedding trends (creating new landing pages for "micro weddings" or other trending styles)
- Better lead capture through keeping users on site longer
- Two-pronged SEO approach: venue-specific AND style-specific searches
Early Adoption
The site launched to immediate positive feedback. The marketing team report that creating new pages is straightforward and intuitive. The SEO team have commended the technical build quality and improved crawlability. Performance metrics show strong page load speeds across all devices.
The Results
The website is a finalist in the 2026 UK Digital Excellence Awards.
Search Console shows that from launch until the time of writing, clicks have grown by over 400%.
The analytics shows the following results since launch, when compared to the same period year-on-year:
