Case Study: Rescuing Home Farm Holdings From a Locked-Out AI Website

We've just relaunched the website for Home Farm Holdings, a forestry, agricultural and land services business working across the Cotswolds and surrounding areas. They look after estates, farms, smallholdings, parks and gardens, with everything from woodland management and chipping to fencing, paddock maintenance and storm damage tree work.

Their old website had been built with an AI website builder. It looked good, but behind the scenes it had left the business stuck. Here's how we got them back in control.

The problem: a website they couldn't touch

This is a story we're hearing more and more. AI tools make it quick and cheap to get a good-looking website online, but they don't always leave you owning it in any practical sense. When Home Farm Holdings came to us:

• They were locked out. They had no working login, so they couldn't change a phone number, add a photo or post an update.
• They had no access to the code. The site lived inside the platform that built it, with no way to download it or hand it to someone else.
• It was hard to understand. Without a technical background, it wasn't clear how the site was put together, where it was hosted or who to ask for help.
• It was hosted overseas. For a business serving customers in the Cotswolds, that's not ideal for speed, support or knowing exactly where your data lives.

They liked how the site looked and didn't want to start again from a blank page. They just wanted a website they could actually own and run.

What we did

The same look and feel

We rebuilt the site from the ground up, keeping the design they were happy with: the Cotswolds countryside photography, the gold and green colours, the elegant headings and the layout their customers already knew. Visitors wouldn't notice a dramatic change. The difference is all underneath.

The rebuilt site has:

• Home: all eight core services, out-of-hours and emergency call-out, ash dieback felling and client testimonials
• About: the story of the business and the way they work
• Storm Damage: a dedicated page for fallen, split and hung-up trees, which is exactly what people search for after a storm
• News & Views: their blog, with all their existing posts brought across and sorted into General and Wildlife
• Contact: a simple enquiry form, phone number and map
• Legal & Privacy, with cookie settings

It works properly on phones, which matters when a farmer or estate manager is looking for help from the field.

SEO set up properly

AI-built websites often look fine to people but are confusing to search engines. We made sure every page follows good SEO practice:

• One clear H1 heading per page, with a logical heading structure underneath
• Descriptive alt text on every image, for accessibility and for Google Images
• A unique title and meta description for every page and blog post
• An automatic sitemap.xml, which updates itself whenever a new blog post is published, plus a robots.txt file pointing search engines to it
• Canonical tags, so Google knows the main version of each page
• Structured data on every page, helping Google and AI search tools understand who the business is and what it does
• Share images, so links look good on Facebook, WhatsApp and LinkedIn

If you're curious why this matters even more now, our guide to optimising your website for AI search explains how tools such as ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews decide which websites to recommend.

A custom CMS they can use themselves

The most important part of the brief was making sure Home Farm Holdings never gets locked out of their own website again. So we built them a simple, custom content management system (CMS) designed around exactly what they need to change, and nothing they don't.

From their own admin area they can:

• Edit the words and photos on every page
• Add, edit or reorder services and customer testimonials
• Write and publish News & Views posts, or save them as drafts
• Upload photos to a media library and pick them from a list
• Update contact details, such as the phone number, email address and social links, once for the whole site

The layout is fixed, so nothing they do can break the design. And because the content is stored in simple files rather than locked inside a platform, the website is theirs. If they ever want to move it, they can.

Built to be secure

As a cyber security company, we treat a login page as the front door, and build it accordingly:

• Two-factor authentication on every login, using an authenticator app on their phone, plus single-use backup codes in case the phone is lost
• Strong password protection, with modern hashing and automatic lockouts after repeated failed attempts
• Safe photo uploads. Every uploaded image is checked and re-processed, so nothing harmful can be hidden inside it
• No database to hack and no plugins to keep updating
• Settings and content stored outside the public part of the website
• Strict security headers, including a Content Security Policy, HSTS and clickjacking protection
• A spam-protected enquiry form, with no "I'm not a robot" puzzles for customers

Hosted in the UK

Finally, we moved the website onto our own UK-based hosting infrastructure. That means fast loading for UK visitors, free SSL, regular backups and, most importantly, a team in the UK who know the site inside out and can pick up the phone.

Stuck with an AI-built website?

AI website builders are brilliant for getting started, and we've written about what AI can and can't do when building a website. The problems tend to arrive later, when you need to change something, move host or fix a problem and find you don't really have control.

If that sounds familiar, we can help. We can host your AI-built website on secure UK servers, or rebuild it with the same look and feel and a CMS you can use yourself. Take a look at our website design service and UK web hosting, or try our free SEO health check to see how your current site measures up.

Get in touch or call us on 03303 410 910 for a friendly, no-obligation chat.

Visit the new website: homefarmholdings.co.uk