Pace Driving Academy

Freelance
Web DeveloperRemote

The redesign

Pace Driving Academy website before redesign
Before
Pace Driving Academy website after redesign
After
Before & after the website redesign

Lighthouse scores

Performance

Before
6666
After
9898

Accessibility

Before
9393
After
9797

Best Practices

Before
100100
After
100100

SEO

Before
9292
After
100100

Pace Driving Academy is a driving school operating across Milton Keynes, Bedford, and Leighton Buzzard, offering manual and automatic driving lessons.

I redesigned their existing WordPress site with a custom theme, improved performance and SEO, and set up Posthog for analytics and conversion rate optimisation.

What I worked on

  • Custom WordPress theme — Built a bespoke theme tailored to the business, replacing the previous off-the-shelf design with a faster, cleaner, mobile-first layout.
  • SEO & local search — Implemented structured data, schema markup, and local SEO to help the business rank for driving lesson searches in their service areas.
  • Analytics & CRO — Integrated Posthog for privacy-friendly analytics, heatmaps, and conversion rate optimisation to track and improve user journeys.

Stack

  • WordPress
  • WooCommerce
  • PHP
  • JavaScript
  • SEO
  • CRO

What I took away

I've always looked down on WordPress and dismiss it as outdated. But this project changed my perspective. WordPress let me deliver a polished, performant site on a tight timeline, and the client can manage their own content without needing me for every update.