Leeuwin Estate
Leeuwin Estate is one of Australia's most celebrated wineries — known for its Art Series wines, estate concerts, and a history that stretches back to 1972. The website didn't reflect any of that. A dated layout, slow load times, and a content structure that buried the cellar door experience had been damaging both engagement and organic search performance for years.
The brief
A premium brand deserves a premium site.
Leeuwin Estate is one of Australia's most celebrated wineries — known for its Art Series wines, estate concerts, and a history that stretches back to 1972. The website didn't reflect any of that. A dated layout, slow load times, and a content structure that buried the cellar door experience had been damaging both engagement and organic search performance for years.
The brief was specific: rebuild the site to match the brand's premium positioning, with editorial photography given the space it deserves, a wine catalogue that actually converts, and performance that holds up on rural internet connections where many wine enthusiasts browse.
Every decision had to honour the brand's prestige while making the site genuinely fast and findable.
We've been proud of the wine for 40 years. Now we're proud of the website too.
The challenge
Premium imagery. Mobile-first speed.
High-resolution estate and product photography is non-negotiable for a brand at this level. Getting it to load fast on mobile — especially in regional areas — required solving three competing demands:
- ✓Image quality vs. performance. Full-bleed vineyard photography at 4K looks extraordinary; it also weighs 8MB per image unchecked. WebP conversion, responsive srcsets, and lazy loading reconciled the two.
- ✓SEO equity preservation. Years of organic rankings had to survive the migration. Every URL, redirect, and canonical was mapped and preserved before a single line of new code was written.
- ✓Non-technical content editing. The Leeuwin team needed to manage the wine catalogue, update events, and add editorial content independently — without a developer on call.
And the site had to rank. Wine tourism is a competitive search category in Margaret River — organic presence was a primary business objective, not a bonus.
Our approach
Content-first, performance-always.
We started with the content before touching any design — mapping the wine catalogue, event structures, and editorial sections before building a layout to hold them.
- 01
Content audit & SEO mapping
Mapped every URL, canonical, and ranking keyword before the redesign. Protected the equity before we touched anything.
- 02
UX architecture
Redesigned the wine catalogue hierarchy, cellar-door booking flow, and event listings around real user intent.
- 03
Editorial UI design
A full-bleed, editorial layout system in Figma — inspired by wine magazine design, optimized for digital browsing.
- 04
WordPress build
Custom theme with ACF Pro content structures, responsive image pipeline, and PHP 8.2 performance tuning.
- 05
SEO implementation
Schema markup for wine products, events, and local business. XML sitemap, technical fixes, and on-page optimization.
- 06
Performance & launch
Cloudflare CDN, WP Rocket caching, and a Core Web Vitals pass before a carefully managed DNS migration.
Selected screens
The work in detail.
The results
What shipped, and what it moved.
From over 7s on the old site — measured on a 4G connection. Every page now loads under 2.5s including image-heavy editorial pages.
Visitors now explore an average of 3.4 pages per session, up from 2.1. The catalogue structure is doing its job.
Green across all Core Web Vitals on mobile — critical for a brand whose cellar-door visitors browse on their phones.
Leeuwin now appears on the first page of Google for the target Margaret River wine and winery search terms.
Tech stack
Modern tools.
Clean output.
We choose the right tool for every job and write clean, documented code that your team — or any developer — can maintain after handoff.
"We've been proud of the wine for 40 years. The website finally feels like it belongs alongside it. And the speed improvement — visitors are actually staying."
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