Property developer website design: how we rebuilt Aldenham Residential on Wix Studio
A buyer clicks through from Rightmove.
They want to know one thing: is that house still available?
If your website can't answer that in a few seconds, they go straight back to the portal. And the portal doesn't care whose house they end up buying.
That was the real job on Aldenham Residential.
Property developers don't need a prettier brochure. They need a stock list buyers can trust in ten seconds.
Aldenham is an independent property developer building new homes across Hertfordshire, Surrey and London. Small team, boutique schemes, a proper focus on build quality. Their old WordPress site didn't show any of that. Worse, nobody in the team could keep it up to date without going back to an agency every time a plot sold.
So we rebuilt it on Wix Studio. 30 developments. 89 plots. One CMS the Aldenham team now runs themselves.
Here's how we approached it, what we weighed up strategically, and how we made it happen with Wix Studio. If you're a developer or housebuilder thinking about a new site, it's a good look at what property developer website design actually involves under the bonnet.
The new Aldenham Residential homepage, built on Wix Studio.
A property developer's website isn't a brochure. It's a live stock list with a brand on top. Get the stock list wrong and the brand doesn't matter.
What the brief said vs what was really going on
On paper, the brief was simple. Modern site, better imagery, easy to update.
Underneath it, there were three problems.
The real issues we found:
The data lived in PDFs and people's heads. Plot sizes, specs, prices and room dimensions were spread across brochures, spreadsheets and the old site.
Every update needed a developer. Changing a price or marking a plot as sold meant raising a ticket with the previous agency.
Two audiences, one site. Buyers need to find a home. Landowners need to know Aldenham buys land. The old site didn't serve either of them well.
None of that is a design problem. It's a structure problem. So that's where we started.
The strategy: build the database before the design
Most new homes websites start with the homepage. We started with a spreadsheet.
Aldenham's marketing lead had built a master spreadsheet of every development and plot. It was thorough. The plot sheet alone had 98 columns, 45 of them just for room names and measurements.
That's great in a spreadsheet. It's unworkable in a CMS. Nobody wants to scroll past 98 fields to change a price.
So before a single page was designed, we agreed the data structure. We kept almost all of her detail and redesigned three things to make it work the way Wix does, not the way Excel does:
Good property developer website design starts with the data, not the homepage.
Rooms became their own collection. One row per room instead of 45 columns per plot. Add a room, add a row. That took each plot record from 98 fields down to around 55.
Duplicate IDs and yes/no text became proper fields. Real reference fields between plots and developments, and true/false switches for things like heat pumps and EV charging.
One URL pattern, decided up front. So every old page had a clear new home to redirect to.
We also agreed a tiered approach. Current and forthcoming schemes get the full treatment: every plot, every room, every price. Completed schemes still get their own development page, because they're proof Aldenham delivers, but without a plot grid nobody needs.
Landowners got their own path too: a Land Acquisition page with its own confidential enquiry form, kept separate from buyer enquiries.
And the master spreadsheet stays the source of truth. Aldenham own it, update it and import it. The website follows the data, not the other way round.
Find a Home: every development pulled from the CMS, filterable by status and village.
Nobody buys a house because of a homepage animation. They enquire because the price, the size and the availability were right there when they looked.
How we made it happen with Wix Studio
This is the bit most case studies skip. We won't, because it's where the value is.
Three collections doing the heavy lifting
The site runs on three Wix Studio CMS collections: Developments, Plots and PropertyRooms. Each plot links to its development with a reference field, and a two-way multi-reference means every development knows exactly which plots belong to it.
The result: one template builds all 30 development pages, and another builds all 89 plot pages. Aldenham add a plot in the CMS and the page exists. No designer, no developer.
The specification lives once, on the development. Every plot page reads it through that reference. Update the kitchen spec for a scheme and every plot page in it changes with it.
Pages that adapt to what they're showing
A scheme that sold out years ago shouldn't look like one launching next month.
So the templates react to the data. Developments show Current, Forthcoming or Completed. Plots show Available, Under Offer or Sold, with bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage and price straight from the CMS.
Each development page also pulls its own brochure, location guide and map from the same record. Location splits into Overview, Transport, Schools and Amenities tabs, so a buyer checking the school run doesn't have to wade through the village history to find it.
Plot cards on The Rise: status, bedrooms, bathrooms, size and price, all live from the CMS.
Enquiries that arrive already labeled
Here's a small thing that makes a big difference to a sales team.
Every development and plot page has a register-your-interest form. With a few lines of Velo code (Wix's JavaScript layer), the form fills itself in with exactly what the buyer was looking at. Enquire from The Burgess at The Rise and the subject line already reads “The Burgess at RISE (D1:P4)” before they've typed a word.
No more “which house was this about?” emails. The sales team knows the development and the plot the moment the enquiry lands.
The enquiry arrives already labelled. No more "which development was this about?" emails to untangle.
On a development page, the form pre-fills the scheme.
On a plot page, it pre-fills the exact home, and the specification comes through from the parent development.
Getting the imagery into shape
Property sites live or die on imagery. They also tend to get crushed by it.
Aldenham's latest batch was 80 files of CGIs, photography and floorplans, some only supplied as PDFs. Roughly 250MB. We converted the lot to WebP, sized everything for the web, kept floorplans sharp enough to actually read, and named each file to a convention that maps straight onto the CMS.
It came down to 23MB. And 34 plots across six schemes now each have their own card image and floorplan, instead of a shared placeholder.
Bulk changes through the Wix APIs
Wix Studio isn't just a drag-and-drop editor. Everything in the CMS can be reached through Wix's APIs, and we use that every day.
When we moved every development onto a cleaner, location-based URL, we updated all 30 records in one pass. When plots needed linking to their developments both ways, we cross-referenced them in bulk. Jobs that would take a day of clicking took minutes, and every record was read back afterwards to check it.
If your team needs a developer to mark a plot as sold, you don't have a website. You have a dependency.
The SEO side: moving house without losing the post
A redesign is the quickest way to lose rankings you spent years earning. So we treat it like a house move. You don't leave without redirecting the post.
What we put in place:
A full 301 redirect map. We pulled every legacy development URL out of the old WordPress database, not just the ones in the menu, and mapped each one to its new page.
Location-led URLs. /developments/rise-close-flaunden tells Google, and a buyer, exactly what's on the page.
A page for every development, including completed ones. Old schemes are proof of delivery, and they keep picking up searches for the village or street long after the last plot sells.
SEO titles written from the CMS. “The Rise | New Homes in Flaunden” does a lot more work than “Development 1”.
Sustainability as real data. Heat pumps, MVHR, solar, battery storage and EV charging are things buyers now look for, so they're structured fields on every plot rather than lines buried in a PDF.
Clean foundations. Proper heading structure, alt text on imagery, layouts built for mobile, and Google Search Console and Bing set up as part of go-live.
Go-live has its own trap. Aldenham's email runs through Microsoft 365 on the same domain, so the plan points the website at Wix record by record and leaves the email records exactly where they are. Nobody's inbox goes quiet on launch day. We've written more about that in how to redesign a Wix site without downtime.
If you want the wider picture on how we approach this, have a look at our Wix SEO services.
Testing it like a buyer would
Before handover we tested the site like a buyer, not a designer. Every page type, every button, every form, every filter.
That test logged 49 items, from leftover template copy to a breadcrumb pointing at a page that didn't exist. In housebuilding terms, it was the snagging list. And like any snagging list, it's what separates a finished build from a good one.
Handing over the keys
One line in our proposal mattered more than any other: let the internal team manage developments, plots and content without developer support.
Before launch, Aldenham's marketing lead was already in the CMS updating prices, availability and imagery herself. That's the whole point. Your website shouldn't need a developer every time you want to publish.
What we learned
Property developers don't need a prettier brochure. They need a stock list buyers can trust, and a team that can keep it current.
Good property developer website design starts with the data, not the homepage. Get the data model right first and the design has something solid to sit on. Get it wrong and every sale turns into a support ticket.
That goes well beyond housebuilding. Anything with a catalogue, a portfolio or a list that changes follows the same rule. We saw exactly the same thing with a pump manufacturer with 42 pages and no way to find a pump.
A finished website and a working website aren't the same thing. The difference is whether the people who own it can keep it true.
If you're a property developer or housebuilder and your website still feels like a PDF with a menu, drop us a line. We'll tell you straight what it would take.
If you're a property developer or housebuilder thinking about a Wix Studio rebuild, book a free call here and we can talk through what the right structure looks like for your catalogue.
Frequently asked questions
What should a property developer website include?
At minimum: a page for every development, live plot availability and pricing, floorplans and room dimensions, the specification, location information, a brochure download and an enquiry form that tells your sales team exactly which home the buyer means. Completed schemes deserve pages too, because they're your proof of delivery.
Is Wix Studio good enough for a property developer website?
Yes, if it's built properly. Wix Studio's CMS, dynamic pages and Velo code handle multi-development, multi-plot sites comfortably, and your team gets an editor they can actually use. The key is designing the database before the pages. If you're weighing up platforms, our Wix Harmony vs Wix Studio comparison is a good place to start.
Can our own team update prices and plot availability?
That's the point of building it this way. On the Aldenham site, prices, statuses, images and floorplans all live in the CMS. Change a plot to Sold and the listing, the development page and the plot page all update together.
Will we lose Google rankings moving from WordPress to Wix?
Not if the move is planned. Map every old URL to its new page with 301 redirects, keep your page titles and content strong, and submit the new sitemap to Google Search Console on launch day. Rankings can wobble for a few weeks during any migration, but a mapped move protects the value you've already built.
Why do we need our own website if buyers use Rightmove and Zoopla?
Portals are where buyers find you. Your own site is where they decide whether to trust you. It's also the one place you control the story, capture enquiries directly and show off completed schemes the portals forgot about years ago.
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