WAKOOS Centre4Children is live

Another one is live. WAKOOS Centre4Children went up on 22 August 2026 at wakoosc4c.co.uk, rebuilt from scratch in Next.js and served from Cloudflare instead of the drag-and-drop site builder it had been sat on for years.

I should declare the interest early. WAKOOS is a charity-run nursery on Station Road in Billingshurst, West Sussex, and I am on their committee as treasurer. I wrote about taking the role a few weeks ago, and that post ended by wondering what an engineer thinks they can bring to a job built on spreadsheets. This is the answer.

↔

BeforeAfter

What it was costing#

£65.06 a month. £781 a year. Not for one website, but for three unrelated contracts invoiced on three different dates, one of which was a second site builder that nobody had ever used. The website itself was the second cheapest thing on the bill.

I have taken that apart properly in the case study, because the interesting part is not that static hosting is cheap. Everyone knows static hosting is cheap. The interesting part is that the bill never said what it was for, and that the biggest line on it was not hosting at all.

What it costs now#

Nothing to host. The site is a static export served by a Cloudflare Worker, comfortably inside the free plan with a great deal of room left. The only unavoidable cost in the whole arrangement is the two domain names, at roughly £9 a year each.

So: £781 a year became about £20 a year, and the £20 is two domain names.

Faster#

The old site scored 59 on Lighthouse performance and 64 on accessibility. The new site scores 99 and 100, with best practices and SEO at 100 as well. Every category into the green.

The number I would actually point at, though, is accessibility: 64 before, 100 now. Performance is the one everybody quotes, but accessibility is the one that decides whether a parent using a screen reader, or squinting at a phone outside the nursery gate, can actually use the site.

Better#

The money is the easy story. The part I am happier about is everything the old platform could not do, all of it now live:

• A fees calculator. Pick which sessions your child attends on which days, an age band, and whether you have 11 or 22 funded hours, and it totals the week and the month, with funded hours taken off the top and meals added automatically for the sessions that cover them. Fees used to be a PDF and some arithmetic.
• Twenty four policy, fees and Ofsted documents pulled off the old host and served from the new site, so nothing depends on the old provider staying up.
• A twenty five question FAQ, every answer assembled from wording the nursery had already published somewhere nobody was going to find it.
• Structured data on every page, tying the address, opening hours, phone number, charity number and Ofsted URN to one business. Aimed squarely at somebody typing "nursery in Billingshurst".
• Link previews. Share it in a WhatsApp group and you get a branded card with the Ofsted rating and the funded places on it, rather than a bare URL.
• A favicon. There wasn't one.

Theirs#

Every word on the site is WAKOOS's own, carried across from the old one. I did not invent copy for a nursery, and I would be wary of anyone who did. Where the new site says something the old one did not, it is because the wording already existed in a policy document or a fee schedule and had simply never made it onto a page.

The content lives in Sanity, so the committee edits the fees, the vacancies or the staff list in a browser, hits publish, and the site rebuilds itself. No proprietary editor to learn, no page to accidentally break, and no phone call to me. The same way Split Lip Adventures works, and the same idea as built to run without me, which is still the only handover I trust.

Go and look#

wakoosc4c.co.uk. If you want the old one for contrast, the Internet Archive has it, captured the day before the nameservers moved.

One honest note to end on. The site is live, but the exit is not finished: two domain transfers and one contract cancellation still to go. The reason the last one waits until January is that providers do not refund mid-term, so leaving early would cost more than staying.

The full reconstruction is in the case study: what was actually on the bill, why the two "free" domains were the only thing on it we could not walk away from, why the email needed no work at all, and the order you have to unpick it in so that nobody's inbox goes dark.