► The Brief
Total Bounce had been hiring out bouncy castles and inflatables across Weston-super-Mare, North Somerset, and South Bristol for over 20 years. Their existing website was slow, difficult to manage, and converting poorly. The brief was to rebuild everything.
The client needed a site that could handle real-time availability checking, online deposits, delivery area management, customer reviews, and local SEO, all without relying on expensive third-party plugins. Everything had to be custom-built, fast, and maintainable by a non-technical team.
► What We Built
A Purpose-Built WordPress Theme
Rather than adapting an off-the-shelf theme, the Total Bounce theme was written from scratch. Every template, shortcode, and hook was built specifically for the needs of a bouncy castle hire business operating in a competitive local market.
Front Page
A high-impact hero with image carousel, live availability calendar, animated trust badges, and a scrolling category ticker. Designed to answer the three questions every visitor arrives with: what do you offer, can I get it on my date, and can I trust you?
Product Pages
Each product page integrates directly with the custom booking plugin, showing real-time availability, deposit pricing, delivery charge calculations by postcode district, and a full booking flow without leaving the page. Product tabs display dimensions in feet and metres with an auto-generated bird’s eye SVG diagram, suitable ages, surface types, and a full FAQ accordion.
Area Landing Pages
48 geographically targeted landing pages, one for every town and village in the delivery area, each with a unique layout personality, AI-generated content, hero imagery, and localised trust signals. All generated from a custom admin panel with a bulk AI generation tool.
Coverage Map
A custom SVG coverage map showing all 48 delivery areas with accurate geographic positioning. Each area is a clickable dot linking to the relevant landing page. Built entirely without any mapping API or third-party dependency.
The Plugins
Eight Custom Plugins, Zero Subscriptions
Every plugin was written specifically for this project. No page builders, no bloated frameworks, no ongoing licence costs.
📅
TB Bookings
Full booking engine with availability calendar, date blocking, delivery charge matrix, deposit collection via PayPal, and admin management of all bookings.
🏫
Area Landing Pages
Generates and manages 48 localised landing pages. Eight distinct layout personalities. Bulk AI content generation with live progress log and image library management.
📈
SEO Audit
Scores every post across nine SEO factors. Bulk trash posts under 65%. Bulk AI fix for borderline posts with live progress log and one-click application.
📏
Product Info
Adds dimension fields with auto-conversion to metres, bird’s eye SVG diagram, age suitability, surface type compatibility, and per-product Q&A to every product.
⭐
Reviews Manager
Stores and manages customer reviews in a local JSON file. Two shortcodes: a compact grid for the front page and a full reviews page with stats and filter bar.
✉
SMTP Mailer
Replaces PHP mail() with authenticated SMTP. Handles all WordPress and WooCommerce emails with separate reply-to handling for contact forms.
❓
Q&A Manager
Global question and answer manager. Questions appear automatically on all product pages and the FAQ shortcode, seeded with 13 pre-written answers on activation.
🔒
SEO Meta Fields
Custom SEO fields on all post types, product categories, product tags, and taxonomy terms with full OG and Twitter card output.
SEO Strategy
Local SEO Built Into Every Layer
The site was architected for local search from day one. Every area landing page targets a specific town or village with unique content, localised schema markup, and correct canonical URLs. The coverage map links to all 48 pages, providing strong internal linking structure.
The custom SEO audit plugin was used to score and clean existing blog content, trashing thin posts that were harming rankings and bulk-fixing meta titles and descriptions. Ahrefs post-launch identified and fixed 152 redirect instances, 19 broken links, and 48 duplicate title tag issues, all resolved without third-party SEO plugins.
Canonical URLs
Open Graph
Twitter Cards
XML Sitemap
48 Area Pages
Async Font Loading
Performance
Fast by Design, Not by Accident
Performance was a design constraint, not an afterthought. The theme ships with no page builder bloat, no unused JavaScript, and a single stylesheet. 20i’s LiteSpeed-based StackCache was configured with appropriate exclusions for WooCommerce pages and booking AJAX endpoints.
PageSpeed scores reached 78 on mobile and 78 on desktop, with a desktop LCP of 0.9 seconds. Hero images are preloaded with fetchpriority="high" and the animated hero element uses GPU compositing via will-change: transform.
WooCommerce
PHP 8.x
20i / LiteSpeed
WebP Images
Anthropic Claude API
PayPal Deposits
By the Numbers
