Headless Rebuild for a Specialist Care Provider

Afeni Healthcare is an independent provider of specialist support for people with learning disabilities, autism, complex needs and mental health conditions, delivering supported living and accommodation across the UK. Their existing WordPress site had become slow and awkward to maintain — a poor fit for an organisation whose enquiries come from families, social workers and commissioners who need clear answers quickly.

We migrated the site to a fully headless build: Next.js on the front end, Payload CMS as the content layer, deployed on Vercel. Every page was rebuilt rather than ported across — support services, facilities, carers, recruitment, and the full set of legal, complaints and accessibility pages — alongside a structured referral form and a jobs board the Afeni team manages themselves. Content is edited in Payload and published to statically rendered pages, giving editors a straightforward interface without the plugin sprawl that made the old site slow.

Performance and security improved on every measure that matters. Pages are pre-rendered and served from the edge cache rather than assembled per request, and the WordPress plugin ecosystem — the source of most compromise in that stack — is gone entirely. The new build ships with a strict Content-Security-Policy, HSTS preloading, frame and MIME-type protections, a locked-down permissions policy, and analytics held behind a cookie-consent gate. The site launched at afenihealthcare.co.uk.