Kingfisher Mortgages
A specialist UK mortgage broker, built twice for comparison. WordPress + Elementor (AI-driven build via Elementor MCP) then rebuilt on Next.js + Sanity headless. Same brand, same copy, real numbers on both.
Reposition a fictional UK mortgage broker for self-employed borrowers, then ship the same homepage on two stacks (WordPress + Elementor MCP, then Next.js + Sanity) so the choice between them is visible rather than theoretical.
Self-employed borrowers (freelancers, contractors, limited company directors) who arrived after being turned down by a bank or stitched up by a comparison site.
Visitors land carrying rejection, not curiosity, so the first surface had to acknowledge that before any feature copy ran.
Fictional brand. The judgement calls are the case study; the Lighthouse numbers below are real, the lender quotes and URLs are illustrative.
Brand fiction first, then a one-block visual system (Fraunces + Inter, italic-coral em rule, cream panels, offset coral shadow), then built end-to-end via Elementor MCP, then ported to Next.js + Sanity for the comparison.
Two production homepages, same brand, same copy. The headless rebuild drops page weight from 7.2 MB to 860 KB and lifts desktop Lighthouse performance from 78 to 96.
Numbers measured live via the Google PageSpeed Insights v5 API on 2026-05-03, desktop strategy, against /kingfisher and /kingfisher-sanity on production. Lighthouse scores fluctuate run-to-run by a few points; values shown are from a single sample.