Platforms We Build On

Built on the platform that fits.

A platform-agnostic practice with deep expertise in seven of them — WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, and clean custom builds. We pick the tool that fits the brief, not the tool that suits the agency.

Seven platforms. · WordPress to JAMstack. · Built. Migrated. Maintained. · Platform-agnostic, expertise-deep.
01 — Platforms We Specialise In

Seven platforms,
each chosen on merit.

The right platform is the one that fits the work — the editorial team’s habits, the catalogue’s complexity, the performance ceiling, the SEO requirements, and the budget over the next three years. We work in seven we know deeply, and we are honest about which suits which kind of brief.

Each row below opens a deeper page — what we do on the platform, where its limits lie, and the kinds of project it serves best.

N° 01

WordPress

The web’s most flexible CMS.

The platform we build on most. Around forty percent of the web runs on WordPress for good reason — flexible content modelling, the largest plugin ecosystem in software, and full ownership of theme, hosting, and database. We build new sites on a GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks V2 foundation that scores well on Core Web Vitals out of the box, and we rescue the sites that were not built that way.

N° 02

WooCommerce

E-commerce, your way.

The most flexible e-commerce platform in the world — and the most demanding to run well. A WooCommerce store with a thousand SKUs and a hundred orders a day is a different animal from the brochure site it grew out of. We build new stores on a performance-first foundation, optimise sluggish catalogues, and rebuild the checkouts that are quietly leaking revenue.

N° 03

Shopify

Hosted commerce, done right.

Fast, reliable, and most of the operational headache removed. What Shopify does not give you is great SEO out of the box, deep content capability, or unlimited customisation. We work the Online Store 2.0 architecture — sectioned themes, JSON templates, metaobjects — and we add the schema, content, and technical SEO layer the platform leaves to you.

N° 04

Squarespace

Beautiful sites, ship fast.

A handsome, easy way to ship a small site quickly — and a closed platform with real limits that some sites never bump into and others bump into hard. We help clients get the most out of Squarespace where it fits — site setup, template configuration, custom CSS, SEO inside the platform’s constraints — and we plan clean migrations the day the limits stop fitting.

N° 05

Wix

Honest help, inside the limits.

Wix has improved meaningfully — but it still has structural limits that make some kinds of growth genuinely hard. We work the levers Wix actually exposes (Studio, the modern SEO settings, Velo for programmatic logic) and fix the SEO problems that are inside the platform’s ability to fix. When the limits are blocking real progress, we plan a clean migration off.

N° 06

Webflow

Design fidelity, hosted.

A unique seat — visual building tool with the design control of custom code, hosted infrastructure with most of the platform-lock-in of a closed builder. The right choice for design-led brands willing to work within real CMS limits. We build production Webflow sites from Figma with clean class systems, architect collections that scale, and handle the SEO and performance work the platform leaves to discipline rather than plugins.

N° 07

Custom & Static Sites

JAMstack, headless, bespoke.

When the requirements outgrow what hosted platforms can deliver — true performance ceiling, full content ownership, an API-driven architecture, or a frontend that does not look or behave like everyone else’s. We build production JAMstack and headless sites with Astro, Next.js, Remix, Hugo, Eleventy, or SvelteKit, integrate Sanity, Contentful, Payload, or headless WordPress as the CMS, and keep the SEO discipline that JavaScript-rendered sites still need to be findable.

02 — How We Choose

Platform-agnostic.
Expertise-deep.

Most agencies choose one platform and bend every brief to fit it. We chose the inverse — work in seven we know well, and pick the one that fits the brief on its own merits. Three principles guide every recommendation.

None of these are platform pitches. They are the questions we work through in the first conversation, before any technology shortlist gets drawn up.

i

Start with the business

Every platform recommendation begins with the business, not the technology. Who edits the site week to week, and what is their tolerance for technical interfaces? How often does the catalogue or content change? What integrations does the back office actually depend on? Where does the budget for hosting and maintenance sit, both this year and three years from now? The answers narrow the shortlist faster than any technology checklist — most projects rule out four platforms before we have looked at a single feature comparison.

ii

Audit before assuming

If you already have a site, the recommendation starts with an audit, not a pitch. We measure the existing platform’s actual constraints — the ones costing you traffic, conversion, or hours each month — and weigh them against the cost of moving versus the cost of staying. Sometimes the answer is a clean migration. Sometimes it is fixing what is fixable on the current platform. Either way, the recommendation is grounded in what your site is actually doing today, not in a hypothetical greenfield brief.

iii

Honest about tradeoffs

Every platform is a set of tradeoffs. WordPress trades operational simplicity for flexibility. Shopify trades customisation ceiling for reliability. Squarespace trades depth for speed-to-ship. Webflow trades plugin ecosystem for design fidelity. JAMstack trades editor friendliness for performance ceiling. We tell you which tradeoffs you are signing up for in plain language before the build starts — so the platform’s limits are a known cost, not a surprise twelve months in.

03 — Migrations

Off one platform.
Onto the right one.

The single biggest reason businesses do not move off the wrong platform is fear of losing what they have already built — search rankings, content history, customer accounts, custom configuration. Migrations done well preserve all of it. Migrations done badly erase years of equity in a weekend.

Migration is one of the disciplines we have done most often, on most platform combinations, in both directions. Every move is two projects in one — a content and design rebuild on the destination platform, and a meticulous SEO migration that preserves the search equity already accumulated on the source. Skip either half and the new site lands looking better and ranking worse. We treat migration as a single project with one plan, one timeline, and one accountable team for both halves.

I Builder → Builder

Platform-to-platform.

Wix to WordPress, Shopify to WooCommerce, Squarespace to Webflow, WordPress to headless JAMstack — and back the other way when the brief calls for it. Most moves happen because a closed platform has hit its ceiling: the SEO controls are too thin, the plugin ecosystem too narrow, the long-term cost too high. We carry over content, URL maps, redirects, schema, and search equity. The new site lands looking better and ranking the same — or higher.

II HTML → CMS

Custom static onto a manageable stack.

Old hand-coded HTML sites — sometimes maintained for a decade — usually look fine, but every copy edit takes a developer. We rebuild on a CMS the team can actually edit (WordPress, Shopify, or Webflow, depending on the work the site does), preserving the design, the URLs, and the SEO weight. The dependence on someone else’s hands every time the marketing copy changes goes away in a single project.

III Hosted → Self-managed

Off the rented platform, onto your own.

Move from a closed hosted platform — Wix, Squarespace, Webflow on Webflow’s hosts — onto a self-hosted stack the business genuinely owns. Same content, same look, same URLs, but with full database access, configurable hosting, and freedom from monthly platform-fee creep. We handle the migration end-to-end: backup, rebuild, test on staging, cut over with redirects validated, and a thirty-day post-launch monitoring window.

The SEO half is the half that goes wrong most often. URL maps left unfinished. Redirects deployed without testing the long tail. Canonical tags forgotten on the new platform. Schema not recreated. We treat the migration’s SEO work as a project in its own right — full URL mapping pre-launch, redirects validated against the live source, post-launch crawl monitoring on a daily cadence for the first month, and a recovery checklist if rankings dip. More on the methodology on the SEO page.

04 — A second complimentary report

Wondering why your site feels slow?

Send us your URL. We’ll send back a Premium Performance Report within 48 hours — page speed, Core Web Vitals, accessibility, and a prioritised fix list ranked by impact on rankings and conversion.

No sales call required.

The best platform is the one that fits — not the one we build on most, and not the one trending on the timeline this quarter.
— The Aureole Practice —
05 — Frequently Asked

Questions about
the platform choice.

If a question is missing here, the contact link at the foot of the page goes straight to the person who would answer it. No ticket queues, no funnels.

i Do you have a preferred platform?
We build on WordPress most often — it is the platform that suits the largest share of the work we do, and our team has the deepest hands-on history with it. That is a track record, not a preference dressed up as one. We also build on every other platform on this page, regularly, and we have moved clients in both directions between them. If WordPress is not the right fit for the brief, we will say so — and we will recommend the platform that is, even when that means a smaller engagement than a WordPress build would have been. The honesty is the point. More on the WordPress practice.
ii How do you choose between WordPress and Shopify for an e-commerce brief?
The deciding question is rarely the storefront features — both platforms can render a perfectly competent product page. It is everything around the storefront. WooCommerce wins when the catalogue is unusual (subscription products, configurators, complex variations, B2B pricing tiers), when the site already has substantial content marketing or editorial that needs to live alongside the shop, when integrations with niche back-office tools matter, or when the budget is constrained enough that monthly platform fees are a real concern. Shopify wins when the store is the site, when reliability and frictionless checkout matter more than customisation depth, when the team running it does not have the appetite for WordPress maintenance, or when the operational simplicity of hosted commerce justifies the platform fee. We will walk through it in the first conversation, with the specific catalogue and team in mind.
iii Can you migrate us off a platform we’re stuck on?
In most cases, yes. We have run migrations in every direction this page describes — Wix and Squarespace to WordPress, Squarespace to Shopify, WordPress to Webflow, Shopify to WooCommerce, WordPress to JAMstack and headless. The hardest part of any migration is not moving the content; it is preserving the search equity. Every migration we plan starts with a full URL audit of the source, a redirect map that covers the long tail, schema and structured-data recreation on the destination, and post-launch crawl monitoring for the first month. We also flag honestly when a migration is not the right call — sometimes the work to move outweighs the work to fix the current platform, and we will say so before we have written a proposal.
iv Do you build custom solutions if none of the platforms fit?
Yes — and we are honest that most projects are better served by a hosted or open-source platform than by a custom build. Custom is the right answer when the requirements genuinely outgrow what platforms can deliver: a real performance ceiling that hosted infrastructure will not break through, full content ownership across an unusual schema, an API-driven architecture that has to integrate with internal systems, or a frontend behaviour that simply cannot be expressed in a platform’s templating layer. When that is the brief, we build with the framework that fits — Astro, Next.js, Remix, Hugo, Eleventy, or SvelteKit — and we integrate a headless CMS (Sanity, Contentful, Payload, or headless WordPress) so the editorial team has a real authoring experience. More on the custom and static practice.
v How do you handle the trade-off between speed and flexibility?
The short answer: there is almost always a configuration that gives you both, but it requires discipline. WordPress can be very fast — faster than Shopify in many benchmarks — when it is built on a lean theme stack like GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks, kept on a quality host, and audited regularly for plugin bloat. Shopify is fast by default but slows under heavy app installation. Webflow is fast when the team respects bundle weight in the build. JAMstack sites are typically the fastest of all, at the cost of editor friendliness. We measure Core Web Vitals before and after every build, every migration, and every major change — so the trade-off is a known number on a dashboard, not a hope.
vi Do you support clients on platforms you didn’t build?
Yes, on every platform on this page. Most of our retainer and maintenance clients came to us with a site already built — by another agency, by a freelancer, by a previous in-house team, or by themselves. The first month of any engagement is an audit and orientation against the existing build: where the platform sits today, what is configured well, what is broken, what risks are sitting in the queue, and what the priorities are for the first quarter. The work compounds from there. More on Maintenance & Care Plans.
The Invitation

Ready to build on
the right foundation?

Start with a free performance report on your current site, or a conversation about the platform that fits your next one. Either way, you’ll hear back from the team that does the work, not a sales department.

Mon–Fri · 9–6 PT support@aureoleintelligence.com Reply within 1 business day