Kensington businesses do not need another WordPress agency. They need someone who can ship the modern-stack version.

Kensington is a particular kind of brief. The businesses I work with here are not first-time-website territory. They are running real revenue, they have a brand they care about, and they have outgrown the WordPress install a freelancer set up for them in 2019. The design ambition is high but the existing site is dragging the brand down — slow, ugly admin, fragile under traffic.

Specifically, the Kensington-based clients I take on tend to fit one of these three shapes:

• High-end retailers and galleries on High Street Kensington or Kensington Church Street who need site performance that matches the brand quality
• Embassies, cultural institutions, and professional services in W8 with complex multi-stakeholder workflows
• Restaurant groups, hotels, and hospitality brands operating in Kensington that need bookings, multi-locale, and proper SEO transport

If your business in W8 sits in any of those, the rest of this page describes how I actually deliver.

Three differentiators from the generic London agency route, none of which are visible on a typical agency homepage:

Modern stack, not WordPress-everything

I build on Next.js, Astro, and Supabase first. WordPress when the brief genuinely calls for it. The reason: most clients I take on have already done the WordPress route once and the second site needs to be ten times faster, ten times harder to hack, and not a plugin lottery. My take on WordPress alternatives is here, and the specific case for the modern-stack path is in the WordPress Stack Advisor — paste your URL and the tool walks through the right answer.

Personal brand, not an account manager chain

Most Kensington businesses have the agency-fatigue version of this story: kicked off with the founder, ended up with a junior account manager three weeks in. I am the senior on every engagement I take. Twelve thousand sites of practice across nine years, four global hubs at Seahawk Media, and the kickoff conversation is with me directly — not a sales chain.

Notting Hill office, in-person when it helps

The studio is at Office 77, 22 Notting Hill Gate. For Kensington clients, that is a ten to twenty-minute walk or a single tube stop. Most engagements run on Slack and Calendly, but I am genuinely close enough that we can meet in person for the parts where it matters — kickoff, design review, post-launch.

Three things to watch for in any London agency proposal that does not explicitly address them:

• Plugin sprawl on day one. If the proposal lists 20-plus plugins as the build approach, the security and performance posture is already broken before launch. Modern stack means fewer dependencies, not more.
• Designer-developer handoff with two account managers. The fastest engagements are the ones where the senior who scoped the work is the same one who codes the work. Most agencies cannot deliver that past employee five.
• No SEO transport plan for migrations. If you are moving off an existing site and the proposal does not mention redirect maps, Yoast or Rank Math metadata transport, or schema preservation — the migration will lose rankings. Every time.

My site migration playbook covers the SEO transport side specifically, and the WordPress to Next.js migration post is the technical detail.

Kensington engagements skew higher-end. The brief is rarely "build me a website" — it is more often "we have an existing site that does not match the brand we have built, and we need it rebuilt without losing rankings, traffic, or the editor workflow our team relies on." The work is most often a migration plus a rebuild rather than a greenfield project.

The migration component is what most generic agencies underprice and under-deliver on. My site migration playbook is the practical version of what the engagement covers. Redirect maps, byte-identical metadata transport, schema preservation, the parts that separate a clean migration from a six-month traffic recovery.

The studio is a five-minute drive from High Street Kensington and a ten-minute walk from the V&A. In-person discovery, design review, and stakeholder workshops happen at the studio or at a venue you prefer.

Do you offer web design in Kensington?

Yes. The studio is at 22 Notting Hill Gate, which is a short hop from Kensington. The engagements are run on Slack and video calls primarily; in-person kickoff and design reviews when they help. London-rate pricing in line with the kind of work — not the cheapest in the borough, not the most expensive.

What stack do you build on?

Next.js, Astro, and Supabase by default. Headless WordPress when the editorial team is already in wp-admin and the public site needs the modern stack. Sanity, Payload, Storyblok, or Strapi as the CMS layer when the brief calls for it. WordPress monolithic only when it is genuinely the right tool — small content sites, established editorial teams, no complex requirements.

How much does a Kensington website project cost?

Realistic ranges in 2026: £8,000 to £25,000 for a content-led marketing site with modern stack and SEO transport. £25,000 to £75,000 for a custom build with authenticated areas, dashboards, or programmatic SEO. £75,000 and up for ecommerce, multi-language, or 50,000-plus page directories. The first 30-minute call is the fastest way to get a real number for your specific brief.

Can you help with WordPress maintenance, not just new builds?

Yes. Managed care plans run from £200 to £2,000 a month depending on site size and SLA. The WordPress support service page covers the actual scope. London-based businesses get faster response windows because I genuinely live and work here.

Do you take on small projects?

It depends on the brief. Single-page landing pages and minor content updates are usually better placed with a freelancer or a smaller agency. Anything past 5 pages, anything involving migration, anything with structured data or programmatic content, anything with a real performance or security requirement — that is where I add the most value.

If you are running a business in Kensington and your website is the bottleneck — too slow, gets hacked, the editor team can't update it without breaking it, or the new design that was supposed to ship in March is still in Figma — the next 30 minutes is the fastest way to fix the diagnosis.

Book a 30-minute call from the button at the top of this page. No slide deck, no qualification screen. You describe the brief, I tell you whether I am the right person, and by the end of the call you have a stack pick, a price range, and a realistic timeline.