Jon BondProduct & accessibility designerHigh-Performance Digital Identity
Bond Architects · Architecture / Digital · 2025
An architect’s website should feel like their buildings: precise, light, and quick to open.
Bond Architects is an Irish studio delivering bespoke design, but its WordPress website no longer reflected the quality and modernity of the work. It was slow, and slowest on the phones most prospective clients arrived on, so the first impression of a precise practice was a page that stuttered.
The goal was a new digital platform that matched the work: precise in its design and quick in the hand, a website that reflects the architecture it shows. I led the project from conception to final implementation, so the design and the build were never separate conversations.
Photography first. Everything else steps back.
The interface is clean, mobile-first, and built to prioritise the project photography. I translated the Bond Architects brand into a scalable digital design system of typography, colour and spacing, then restructured the site map so a visitor moves from discovery to contact without a dead end.
Page transitions and micro-interactions were designed in Framer Motion to feel responsive and engaging, and never to get in the way of a photograph.
Built to load before you notice.
We replaced the legacy WordPress site with a platform built on Next.js, Vercel and Supabase, chosen for speed, reliability and scalability. Pages are delivered through Vercel’s global edge network, so they are served from close to the visitor wherever they are.
I designed the interface around that performance. Every animation had to earn its place by making the browsing experience better, not slower, and every image ships pre-sized and in WebP. On a phone the site opens straight onto the work, and the eight-step enquiry form turns a first contact into a usable brief.
A living portfolio the studio runs without touching code.
The site is powered by Supabase, giving Bond Architects a flexible content management system for their portfolio. The website stopped being a static brochure and became something the studio updates as projects are added or change.
- Upload
The studio adds a project and its JPG photographs. An automated image workflow converts every upload to WebP without anyone editing code.
- Validate
Before each deployment, every project’s hero, gallery directory and image set is checked against the project definitions. A missing or misnamed image fails the build instead of shipping a broken page.
- Describe
Schema.org structured data is generated for every project automatically, so search engines and AI-powered discovery tools understand what each page is about.
- Publish
The change goes live on the edge network. The firm gets a platform it manages itself, and its online visibility improves with each project it adds.
From 55 to 100, confirmed by real visitors.
Lighthouse scored the old WordPress site 55 for performance on desktop. The new site scores 100 on desktop, across performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO, and 85 on mobile. Largest Contentful Paint fell from 3.5 seconds to 0.6, and layout shift went to zero, so nothing jumps while a page loads. Vercel’s real-user monitoring then confirmed it in the field with a Real Experience Score of 100.
- Performance, desktop
- 55 to 100
- Performance, mobile
- 85
- Largest Contentful Paint, desktop
- 3.5s to 0.6s
- Cumulative Layout Shift, desktop
- 0.205 to 0
- Real Experience Score
- 100
Opens in a new tab. bondarchitects.com, in production.
More than a visual refresh: by moving from an outdated WordPress site to a modern, high-performance stack, the studio got a platform as carefully made as the architecture it shows, and one it controls.