Luna Bend

Luna Bend, a Croatian wedding and events band performing since 2000 with more than 1,300 shows, came to me with an online presence that undersold them. The site ran on an aging WordPress build -a musician theme, WooCommerce, an SEO plugin, and plain `?page_id=` permalinks -and much of the content was still template filler from the original theme demo. The install had swollen past a gigabyte and pushed the shared hosting account to 100% disk usage. It leaked visitor data to third-party font servers, had no working search presence, and read like every other template. The account also hosted an unrelated business, so any migration had to leave that neighbor completely untouched.

I rebuilt the whole thing as a hand-crafted static site: a cinematic, monochrome layout built around the band's own photography, with clean URLs, self-hosted fonts, and proper structured data. The copy moved from filler to real writing in the band's voice. I staged everything on a preview host, then cut over in place on the same domain so nothing search engines already knew about would break. The contact form was rebuilt with silent, server-side spam filtering, so real inquiries land and bots don't.

Static over a CMS. For a brochure site that changes a few times a year, WordPress was pure overhead. Dropping it removed the database, the plugins, and the entire maintenance and security burden, leaving a site that loads fast and costs almost nothing to run.

Same-domain, in-place migration. Because the old URLs were plain permalinks pointing at demo pages, a lean set of redirects beat a sprawling URL map, and keeping the domain preserved the homepage's existing indexing.

Self-hosted variable font. Bundling the font with full Croatian diacritic coverage let me drop every third-party call and tighten the site's content security policy.

Isolated server config. With shared hosting and no VPS, I scoped every rewrite rule to this site alone, so the co-hosted business kept working before, during, and after the switch.

The migration freed roughly 1.3 GB of disk and retired the full WordPress and WooCommerce stack. The new site ships with long-lived caching, a strict security policy, and zero cookies or trackers. Clean URLs are verified in Search Console with a submitted sitemap and every page queued for indexing, and the neighbor site was confirmed untouched. The band now has a web presence that matches the quality of their live shows.