West Yorkshire Safety Barriers

Background

West Yorkshire Safety Barriers supply and install a comprehensive range of safety products across Yorkshire and beyond - from Armco crash barriers and bollards to EV charging protection, warehouse racking guards, and residential parking posts. Despite operating across a wide product range and serving both trade and public customers, their old website was holding them back. Built on a long, unwieldy domain, the site lacked the visual credibility, e-commerce functionality, and search presence needed to compete in their market.

They came to Wakefield Website Design wanting a complete fresh start.

The Challenge

The existing site had several significant issues:

• An overly long domain name that was difficult to share, recall, and rank with
• Ecommerce functionality not setup properly - this generated no sales for the entire time it was running.
• Outdated design with no clear product hierarchy or category structure
• No SEO foundations - missing meta data, poor page structure, no local signals
• No conversion-focused elements such as trust badges, USPs, or calls to action

The client had also recently secured a shorter, sharper domain - wysafetybarriers.co.uk - and wanted the migration handled cleanly so no existing traffic or link equity was lost.

Our Approach

Platform & Build

We built the new site from scratch on WordPress, with WooCommerce powering the product catalogue and checkout, and Elementor used throughout for page design and layout. This stack gave the client the flexibility to manage their own product listings and content going forward, without needing developer support for day-to-day updates.

Design

The redesign focused on clarity and trust. A clean, professional layout was built using a consistent design system - bold section headers, strong CTAs, and a product range that's easy to navigate from the homepage. The header includes the phone number prominently, social links, and a full mega-menu covering all product categories and subcategories.

The homepage hero communicates the brand's core USPs immediately: free GB delivery, low prices guaranteed, and a 5-star rating - along with a first-order discount code to support conversion.

WooCommerce Product Structure

The product catalogue spans a complex range of categories - barriers, bollards, bollard sleeves, cycling infrastructure, EV charging protection, parking posts, street furniture, traffic management, and workplace/warehouse safety products. We structured the WooCommerce taxonomy to reflect how customers actually search and browse, with parent categories and logical subcategories throughout.

Features including product comparison, wishlists, and customer account registration were configured to match the expectations of both trade buyers and retail customers.

Domain Migration & 301 Redirects

The old, longer domain was retired and replaced with the new wysafetybarriers.co.uk. To protect any existing rankings, backlinks, and direct traffic, we implemented a full set of 301 redirects from the old domain, routing every URL cleanly to its equivalent on the new site. Where no direct equivalent existed, traffic was redirected to the most relevant category or the homepage. This ensured no traffic was lost during the transition and that search engines updated their index without penalising the site.

SEO Foundations

Alongside the build, we put in place the core on-page SEO foundations - meta titles and descriptions across key pages, clean permalink structures, schema-ready page templates, and properly tagged heading hierarchies. The site launched index-ready, with Yoast SEO configured site-wide.

The Result

The finished site at wysafetybarriers.co.uk is a fully functional e-commerce platform built to support both B2C and trade customers. The product catalogue is comprehensive, well-structured, and easy to manage. The domain migration was handled without any measurable loss of traffic, and the new site gives the business a credible, professional online presence that reflects the scale and quality of what they offer.