Nearly 20 Years, One Law Firm: What Long-Term WordPress Care Actually Looks Like

Agencies love to talk about client retention. Here's what it actually looks like. Richard Antrobus runs The Employment Law Solicitors, a UK employment-law firm, and he has been our client since the mid-2000s. That's close to 20 years, multiple complete rebuilds of his website, and a working relationship that has outlasted most of the web agencies that existed when it started. Richard has agreed to be named in this study; his firm's traffic figures stay private, and we explain why below.

A WordPress Client Since the Mid-2000s

Richard first came to us in the early years of the business, which our founder Mark McNeece established in 2001. Since then we have built and rebuilt his firm's website several times over, as design standards, devices and WordPress itself moved on. Each generation of the site was a full rebuild, not a re-skin: new platform version, new structure, content carried forward and improved.

His one public review of us, posted to Google in 2020, is six words long: "Excellent. Thoroughly Recommend". We'll take six words backed by two decades of renewals over six paragraphs from a client we kept for six months.

The Site: Thousands of Pages of Employment-Law Content

The Employment Law Solicitors site is the kind most agencies never get to work on: thousands of pages and posts of UK employment-law content built up over years, covering the questions employees and employers actually search for. That depth made it an authority in its niche, and the site now draws very heavy organic search traffic across UK employment-law queries.

Content depth on that scale changes the technical job. Crawl efficiency, database performance and caching stop being nice-to-haves; with thousands of indexed URLs working for the firm every day, an hour of sluggishness has a measurable cost. It's the same lesson our PageSpeed 100 case study documents on our own site, applied at far greater scale.

The £10 Upgrade We Chose Over the £30 One

By 2026 the site's traffic and page count had outgrown what a standard hosting package is designed to serve. There were two ways to solve it through our sister company 365i, where the site is hosted: move him onto a standalone high-performance plan at £30 a month, or add the per-site Website Turbo upgrade to his existing package at £10 a month, bringing dedicated 4.2 GHz compute, CDN pre-caching and an enlarged database allowance to the one site that needed it.

We recommended the £10 option. It did the same job for his situation, kept his existing setup intact, and cost him a third as much. We'd also point out what we refused to say: his hosting had never been inadequate. The standard package served the site well for years; the upgrade reflects how much the site has grown, not a past mistake. An agency that frames every growth moment as "your old setup was wrong" is training its clients to distrust it.

The Elementor 4 Rebuild, and Why We Waited

The site's current generation was built on the previous Elementor stack, and Richard is now planning a fresh redesign on Elementor 4. The timing is deliberate. When Elementor 4 first shipped, we advised waiting until it had stabilised in production rather than rebuilding a high-traffic legal site on a brand-new major version. A firm whose website answers employment-law questions for a national audience cannot afford a platform regression for the sake of being an early adopter.

That is what two decades of trust buys both ways: we can tell him "not yet" without him wondering whether we're hiding something, and he can plan a rebuild knowing the recommendation serves his site rather than our invoice. The rebuild will go ahead now the platform is ready, as the next generation in a 20-year sequence.

What 20 Years of Retention Actually Proves

Anyone can claim "long-term partnerships" on a services page. A named client who has renewed continuously since the mid-2000s is the evidence version of that claim. It proves the work survives contact with reality across every WordPress era: the rebuilds shipped, the maintenance kept the site healthy, the advice stayed honest even when honesty was cheaper for the client and worse for our short-term revenue.

It also shows what we think an agency relationship should be: not a launch followed by silence, but a standing technical partnership where the same people who built the site answer the phone years later. That model is exactly what our support and maintenance plans productise for sites hosted on 365i.

What We're Not Publishing (and Why)

This case study deliberately omits the firm's Search Console figures: clicks, impressions, positions and the specific queries the site ranks for. Those numbers are Richard's competitive business data. He consented to being named and to the qualitative description above, and that's where the line sits. We'd rather publish a case study with one number missing than teach every client who reads it that their analytics become our marketing material.

What you can verify independently: the firm's site is live and substantial, Richard's five-star Google review is public on our sister company's profile along with 68 others, and our company record is on Companies House (the business began trading in 2001 and incorporated as BSolve IT Limited in December 2002).

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