The People

Sowena Lettings isn’t a typical high-street chain. Founded by Ginny Lean and Jer Grigg—former teachers with decades of local experience—they built their reputation on trust, transparency, and a deeply personal service for landlords in Mid-Cornwall. They needed a digital presence that reflected this “hands-on” ethos. Unfortunately, their initial build let them down, leaving them with a site that looked acceptable on the surface but was technically unsound underneath.

The Problem

When Sowena came to us, their digital operations were a house of cards. The previous provider had built the site on shaky foundations, editing plugins directly rather than using proper templates. This meant the site was a ticking time bomb—a single update could (and often did) break critical functionality.

Worse, their expensive Zoopla integration was misconfigured. Instead of pushing their property data out to the portal automatically, it was trying to pull data in—completely misunderstanding the business need and wasting a significant monthly subscription budget. On top of this, high-quality property videos were embedded poorly, dragging site performance to a crawl and frustrating potential tenants.

The Process

We didn’t just patch the cracks; we re-engineered the foundation. Our first step was a code rescue: stripping out the brittle, hard-coded plugin edits and re-implementing the design using correct, update-safe WordPress methods. This stabilized the platform immediately.

Next, we tackled performance. We moved their heavy 4K property tours off the web server and onto a dedicated Content Delivery Network (CDN) with dynamic streaming. This allowed for crystal-clear video playback without slowing down the homepage load times—crucial for keeping mobile users engaged.

Finally, we fixed the data flow. We reconfigured the Zoopla integration to “push” listing data correctly, ensuring their properties appeared on the UK’s biggest portal instantly, without manual double-entry.

The Product

Sowena now has a robust, high-performance lettings platform that works as hard as they do. But we didn’t stop at the website. As Systems Engineers, we looked at their entire workflow.

We implemented smart business automations to reduce their admin burden. Meeting notes from Otter.ai now flow automatically into their Asana task management system, ensuring nothing gets lost. We also set up automated MailChimp communication flows for tenants and landlords, and provided deep Search Console analysis to help them plan content that captures local search traffic.

The result isn’t just a website; it’s a scalable operating system that allows Ginny and Jer to focus on what they do best: managing properties, not fighting with technology.