Lexden Retreat: Website Rebuild & Online Gift Vouchers
A full rebuild for a Colchester beauty salon, replacing an ageing WordPress site with a fast Astro build and a proper online gift voucher system the salon owns outright.
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Salon Website Design in Colchester: Lexden Retreat
Lexden Retreat has been looking after clients in Colchester since 2000. Facials, aesthetics, massage, Dermalogica skincare, the lot. Twenty five years of regulars, which is not something you can buy with an ad budget.
The website was not keeping up.
The Challenge
Emma had a WordPress site on legacy shared hosting. It worked, in the sense that it loaded. But it was slow, it needed constant plugin attention, and the gift voucher function was unreliable enough that it could not really be trusted at the one time of year when vouchers actually matter.
That is the frustrating part for a salon. December is voucher season. If the voucher page is flaky in November, the sale does not just get delayed, it goes somewhere else entirely, usually to a booking marketplace that takes a cut and keeps the customer.
We had originally planned a rebuild in Divi 5. Partway through the thinking, we made a different call.
The Approach
We scrapped the WordPress route and built the whole thing from scratch in Astro, deployed on Cloudflare Pages. No CMS, no plugins, no monthly hosting bill that creeps upward every renewal. For a salon site, WordPress solves problems Lexden Retreat did not have while creating several it did not need.
The design leans into what the salon actually is: calm, warm, a bit indulgent. Soft neutrals, generous space, quiet typography. It should feel like the room feels.
Then the part that took the real work.
A voucher system the salon owns. Rather than bolt on a plugin or push customers to a third party, we built the purchase flow ourselves using Stripe Elements and the PaymentIntents API. A customer chooses an amount, picks a themed design, writes a personal message, sets a delivery date, and pays by card. The money goes into the salon’s own Stripe account. Thinksay never sits in the middle of it, and no marketplace takes a percentage.
There was a wrinkle. Lexden Retreat runs its salon software through Shortcuts, and Shortcuts manages the Stripe relationship, which means a standard integration does not work. We got round it with a sub-account arrangement inside the existing setup. Worth knowing if you run a salon on Shortcuts and have been told online vouchers are not possible. They are.
Delivery that looks like the brand. Successful payments trigger an automatic email through Resend, using a template built for the salon rather than a generic receipt. The voucher arrives looking like something you would be pleased to receive, which matters when the whole product is a gift. Voucher codes and redemption data sit in Cloudflare KV.
Protection at the payment step. Cloudflare Turnstile guards the payment endpoint against automated abuse, scoped so it only appears at the final step. Genuine customers filling in a message and choosing a date never see it.
Prices the owner can change herself. Emma updates treatment names, prices and descriptions in a Google Sheet, and the site rebuilds from it. No CMS to learn, no login to forget, no ringing us to change £45 to £50. One pricing category is deliberately kept out of the sheet, so sensitive pre-agreed pricing cannot be altered by accident.
A move that nobody noticed. The domain came off the old host and onto Cloudflare, with every DNS record audited and replicated first, including mail routing and SPF and DMARC records. Salon email kept working throughout. The best outcome for a DNS migration is that the client has no idea it happened.
The Solution
What Emma has now is a fast, secure site that looks like her salon, with a voucher shop she can trust in December, prices she can change on a Tuesday afternoon, and no WordPress maintenance to think about ever again.
The voucher flow in particular is not a widget sitting on top of someone else’s platform. It is part of her website, on her domain, paying into her account, building her customer list.
The Outcome
The site launched in summer 2026, ahead of the run-up to the voucher season it was really built for.
Emma’s verdict was that the finished site looks modern and is easy to navigate, and she picked out the extra touches she would never have thought to ask for. That last bit is the job, really. Anyone can build what a client asks for. The value is in the things they did not know were possible.
Run a salon, spa or clinic in Essex? If you are selling gift vouchers through a booking marketplace, or not selling them online at all, there is a better version of that. Have a look at web design in Colchester or marketing for small businesses in Colchester.
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Nick has done a great job creating our new website. It looks modern, is easy to navigate, and we're really pleased with the finished result. Thank you for all your hard work and the extra touches that I'd never have thought about!
— Emma Bennett, Owner, Lexden Retreat
No sales pitch. No pressure. Just an honest conversation about where your business is and where you want to go.