United Apps rebuilt a Wiltshire personal-injury law firm's website, moved it off a dated Wix site onto a fast stack the firm owns outright, and did it without losing a single hard-won Google ranking. Roughly three weeks after go-live the firm ranked number one for "injury lawyer", a broad, competitive term well beyond its original niche. Enquiries have run above target since launch, and the firm has taken on new clients as a direct result.

This was a joint result. United Apps built the foundation. The firm's SEO partner, Luminal, ran the campaign that turned that foundation into first-place rankings. This is the story of the build, and of a rebuild that behaved itself.

The client

FT Injury Solicitors, formerly FT Chronic Pain Solicitors, is a personal-injury firm based in Wiltshire. It is a genuine specialist in a hard corner of the law that most firms avoid, chronic-pain injury claims such as CRPS, fibromyalgia and myofascial pain. Three people, a real reputation, and a client base won the hard way.

The problem

The firm was successful but boxed in, by its own name and its own platform.

The brand said "chronic pain only". The firm wanted to grow into broader serious personal injury, road traffic, workplace and serious-injury work, while keeping the chronic-pain expertise as a specialism rather than the whole identity. Someone searching for a personal-injury solicitor in Wiltshire who landed on a site branded "Chronic Pain Solicitors" had a moment of doubt about whether they were in the right place. The data backed the pivot. The firm's personal-injury page pulled almost no traffic, yet the few visitors who found it stayed and engaged. The intent was there. The site structure simply was not surfacing the page.

The platform was the second constraint. The existing Wix site had performance and tracking limitations, and the firm wanted a fast, search-ready foundation that they actually owned rather than rented. And there was the look of the thing. Most personal-injury firms online lean on ambulance-chaser stock photography. The brief was the opposite, premium, professional and human.

The approach

We built the new site on a modern static-first stack: Astro for the site itself, Keystatic as a file-based CMS, and Cloudflare Pages for hosting, all in the firm's own GitHub repository. In plain terms, the old Wix site rebuilt every page from scratch each time someone visited. Our approach builds every page in advance and serves it, ready-made, from a location near the visitor. We swapped a page that has to be built every time someone knocks, for a page that is already built and waiting at the door. It loads almost instantly, and Google rewards fast sites.

Just as important, the firm owns all of it from day one, the code, the hosting and the CMS logins. There is no platform lock-in. If they ever want to move, they take the site with them. We also created the firm's new "FT" logo as part of the project.

The build followed a deliberate content-first process. We wrote the words before designing the pages, because the words drive the design, not the other way around. A live URL existed within the first hour, and every existing page was recreated as real content before a single component was styled, so there was never a risky launch-day migration.

The single most important technique was how we protected the firm's rankings. On every redesigned page, the new visual hero sits at the top, and the existing keyword-rich body content is preserved intact below it. To a visitor, the page looks completely new. To Google, the content signals are unchanged. That is the mechanism that let the site look brand new without dropping the rankings the firm had spent years earning. Before launch we ran a full page-parity audit, and URL structure was preserved one-to-one.

Briefing the camera with AI, then handing it to a human

Legal imagery is genuinely hard to get right. Stock is clichéd, and an AI image on its own was not good enough for a premium firm's homepage. So we used it differently. We generated a photorealistic target composition, the exact lighting, framing and mood we wanted, showing the firm's two founders as equals. The client approved that image as an art-direction brief, explicitly not as the final asset. The photographer, Darius Jean, then recreated the composition as real photographs in a live shoot in Bath. AI de-risked the creative direction. Real craft delivered the final image. Very few agencies can show that workflow honestly.

The results

Around three weeks after go-live, the firm ranked number one for "injury lawyer", a broad, competitive term outside its original chronic-pain niche, clear evidence the repositioning worked. Alongside it came a sweep of first-place regional rankings across its specialist terms. Ranking movement this fast is unusually quick for organic search, and it happened because the technical foundation let Luminal's campaign move quickly.

The site is genuinely fast, with a PageSpeed score of around 96%. [?] Roughly half of all visitors now arrive through organic search, and around two-thirds of returning visitors arrive organically, a strong trust signal in a field where people research repeatedly before they ever pick up the phone.

On enquiries, the message is simple. They have run above the firm's target since launch, and the firm has onboarded new clients as a direct result.

"The website build gave us a much stronger technical and structural foundation to work from. Faster performance, cleaner code, improved page structure, better user experience, stronger content hierarchy and clearer signals to Google all contribute nowadays, especially with how AI-driven search is evolving."

"We are very grateful for the work you have done in helping us to already grow our online presence. We really love the site and are excited to see where it takes us."

What's next

Launch was the start, not the finish. We are still working with the firm, refining the personal-injury pages, growing the range of terms the site ranks for, and improving how the site turns its readers into enquiries. The firm can log in and edit any page or publish a blog post themselves after a short walkthrough, with no developer needed. The site was built to keep getting better, and that is exactly what it is doing.

Site build: United Apps. SEO campaign: Luminal. Photography: Darius Jean.