JCT Building — Rescued from Base44 in 5 Working Days

The brief

JCT Building is a Telford-based construction firm working across Shropshire and the West Midlands. Their existing website was hosted on Base44 — one of the cheaper US-built page builders — and the platform had become a problem rather than a solution. The site was slow on mobile, the SEO was effectively locked behind Base44's hosting layer, and the platform itself had begun winding down service for many UK users with no clear migration path.

The brief from JCT was straightforward: get us off Base44, keep our domain, preserve our existing brand identity, and have us live again before any disruption to ongoing enquiries. They were not interested in another page-builder platform. They wanted the underlying problem solved, not deferred.

The technical situation

Base44 had no clean export route for the existing site content. The HTML was generated dynamically from their builder layer, with proprietary CSS classes and an opaque JavaScript runtime. There was no usable WordPress XML, no static HTML export, and no API for content extraction. In practice, this meant the rebuild had to start from scratch.

The DNS situation was more recoverable. JCT owned their own domain through a UK registrar, and Base44 had only ever held DNS records pointing at their hosting. That meant we could rebuild on Vercel in parallel without touching the live site, then flip the DNS records once the new build was approved.

Day-by-day

Outcome

JCT Building came off Base44 in 5 working days with their domain intact, their brand preserved, and their site rebuilt as a fast hand-coded Next.js application on infrastructure they actually understand (Vercel + Cloudflare). There was no setup fee. They moved straight onto the £24.99/month subscription plan covering hosting, SSL, and ongoing support.

From a technical standpoint, the new site loads sub-1.5 seconds on mobile, scores 90+ on Google PageSpeed Insights, and exposes the local-business schema markup that Google's algorithm uses to assess construction-trade results. Search Console started picking up new impressions within days of the cutover.

Just as important: JCT now own their site outright. The source code lives in a private GitHub repository, the domain is in their name, and the hosting is on a platform they could hand to any developer in the world. The single-platform risk that put them on Base44 in the first place is gone.

The lesson for other tradespeople still on builders

The biggest mistake we see is waiting until the platform fails before starting the rebuild. By then you are migrating under pressure, often with broken DNS or content you can't extract. The right time to migrate is now, while the existing site is still running and there is no urgency.

If your business is on Base44, Builder.ai (already in administration), Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy's builder, or an old WordPress site, the rescue process described above applies almost identically. Email us with the URL and we will tell you honestly what a migration would look like.