A booking-led rebuild for a Manchester barber studio

Before Chair and Blade existed as a brand, Emmanuel Adjei's public site was a free Wix page under his personal handle, emmanuelsamadj.wixsite.com. Its own title tag listed an address in Cheetham Hill; the studio operates from a different building on St John Street in the city centre now. The page's "Book Now" button already pointed to a scheduling backend called "chairandbladeltd", so the business had outgrown its own website before the website caught up.

The traffic numbers back that up. Over the last twelve months the old page pulled more than 14,000 sessions, but 87% of them bounced and only 68 unique visitors came back across the entire year. Just 1.5% of sessions ever went past the homepage. Pricing, reviews, and a direct way to book were all missing from the page itself. Analytics were missing too, so none of this was visible to Emmanuel until now.

13,766 of those 14,255 sessions, 97%, came from a phone, and the phone version was the weakest thing the old site had. Wix served it as a separate 320px-wide layout: a squeezed hero, a two-across photo grid, and a header carrying nothing but the street address. Pricing, reviews and a service list were all absent, and the only way to book was the same untracked button. The device carrying nearly all of the demand got the least of the site.

The brief was to give the business a public front that matched what was already true behind the scenes. Chair and Blade already had a name, a Manchester city-centre address, and thirteen named signature cuts before the public site reflected any of it.

Booking moved from an external Schedulista link buried behind a "Book Now" button to Square Appointments wired directly into the site. The hero, every signature cut, the pricing page, and the footer all book from the same place, in one tap.

The build also gave Emmanuel a way to run the front of house himself. Reviews render live from his Google Business Profile through Sanity, so when he replies to a client on the site, that reply publishes straight to Google as well.

The site runs on Next.js with Sanity CMS, Square Appointments for booking and payments, and Vercel hosting, the same stack behind the rest of Doman Digital's builds. Given the 97% mobile figure from the old site, the layout was built mobile-first around a scroll-driven hero using real studio photography instead of stock images.

Analytics started from zero. The old page had never carried a tracking tag of any kind, so GA4 and Google Tag Manager were installed fresh, with one dedicated event, book_click, firing specifically on the outbound Square Appointments link rather than relying on a generic click event. That link is the single real conversion on the site, so it is the one thing worth measuring precisely.

The new site ships real Google Consent Mode v2 from day one: analytics cookies default to denied and only get set once a visitor accepts. The old page never had a cookie banner or any analytics to gate in the first place.

Security headers moved from a 30-out-of-100, F grade, on the free wixsite.com subdomain (missing a content security policy, X-Frame-Options, and a referrer policy) to a 100-out-of-100, A grade, on the live domain: a full CSP with per-request nonces, HSTS preload, and the rest of the standard header set.

Thirteen five-star Google reviews have come in since launch, eight of them inside one eight-day run, and Emmanuel can reply to every one of them from the site itself rather than switching to a separate dashboard.

Performance is the honest exception. A live Lighthouse run scores accessibility, best practices, and SEO all at 100, but performance sits at 67, driven by the weight of the hero photography (LCP lands around 7.2 seconds). That is a real, current number, and it is the next priority to tighten.

Search visibility exists for the first time. Search Console showed zero clicks and zero impressions for the old free Wix URL, because the page was never indexed. In the first real reporting window on the new domain it showed 7 clicks and 67 impressions, a small number in absolute terms and a genuine starting point where there was none before.