If you've visited kulea.ma recently, you'll have noticed it looks - and feels - different. We've just finished a ground-up rebuild of the site, and given how much of what we tell recruitment agencies about page speed and good practice applies just as much to us, it felt worth explaining what we changed and why.
What's Changed
The most visible change is the new design: a cleaner platform-vs-BDaaS structure that makes it obvious which side of Kulea you're looking at, proper integration pages for Vincere, Firefish, Bullhorn and Microdec Profile, head-to-head comparison pages against the tools agencies most often ask us about, and a blog that's actually easy to filter and search rather than a flat list.
Under the hood, the change is bigger than the new design. The old site ran on WordPress; the new one is hand-built static HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No CMS, no plugins, no database calls on every page load.
Why We Did It
Three reasons, in order of how much they actually mattered:
- Speed. A static site has nothing to query and nothing to render server-side - the page is just sent. That's most of why the site now scores 97 on mobile and 100 on desktop in Lighthouse. For a marketing automation company that talks to agencies about deliverability and conversion all day, having a slow site of our own was an easy thing to fix and an easy thing to be embarrassed about.
- Control. WordPress is excellent for a lot of things, but every plugin is also a dependency, a vulnerability surface, and a thing that breaks on update. Hand-built pages mean nothing changes unless we change it.
- Maintainability. A flat, simple structure is much easier for our own team to extend - new comparison pages, new integration pages, new sales material - without fighting a theme or a page builder to get the layout right.
How It's Built
Every page is plain HTML and CSS, with a small amount of JavaScript for things like the mobile menu, the blog filters and the logo carousel. Fonts are self-hosted rather than pulled from Google Fonts, which removes an extra cross-origin request on every page load. There's no build step a visitor ever has to wait on - what you see is what gets sent.
What's Next
This isn't a one-off project we'll now leave alone. We'll keep adding to it - more integration depth, more comparison content, more of the practical guidance agencies actually ask us for - and if you spot anything that doesn't work the way it should, we'd genuinely like to hear about it.
Andrew Nicholson
Co-founder & CEO at Kulea. Guest lecturer in digital psychology and behavioural economics at the University of Buckingham.