The Perse School (Singapore)
The Perse School (Singapore) opened in 2024 and needed to take applications before it had a website. We built the application form first, then the full school site, and have run its SEO and care since.
An online application form live within months, a full WordPress school site live in February 2025, and search impressions that have doubled since.
What we were solving
The Perse School (Singapore) is a Cambridge international school for ages 3 to 18, licensed from The Perse School in Cambridge, which has taught for more than 400 years. The Singapore campus sits on 58 Chestnut Drive in Upper Bukit Timah, with room for more than 1,400 students.
In mid-2024 the school was new. Admissions had started, parents were asking for places, and there was no website to send them to. The founding team needed a way to accept applications, collect documents and take the application fee online, and it needed that before anything else.
The full site came second. The school had a brand, a campus still being finished and a curriculum to explain, but almost no photography, because there were no students yet. Content arrived as the school itself took shape, with a marketing manager who joined midway through the build.
How we tackled it
Build the application form first
We split the work into two phases. Phase one was a landing page on perse.com.sg with the application form behind it. We built the form on Gravity Forms with Stripe for the application fee, a save-and-continue link so a parent could come back to a half-finished application, document uploads with a checklist, and a PDF copy of each application for the admissions team. The form took its first live applications in October 2024, while the school was still processing families switching from other schools.
Then the school site, in sprints
Phase two was the full site on perse.edu.sg. We designed it in Figma, with the client commenting page by page, and built it on WordPress with Beaver Builder on WP Engine. Pelicans, Junior School and Senior School each got their own section. Curriculum, campus, teachers, fees, careers and events followed. Where the school had no photography yet, we used AI-rendered imagery as a placeholder, and the marketing team replaced it with real student photos once term was under way. The site went live on 21 February 2025.
Clean up the search footprint
By late 2025 the site had grown past 200 pages, and the early redirects and placeholder pages were showing in Search Console. Under an SEO launch plan we fixed 40 redirecting URLs by building parent landing pages for Academics, Life at Perse and Our Team, redirected 19 dead pages, cleared mixed-content warnings across the database, and wrote meta titles and descriptions for all 228 pages, most of which had none.
What we delivered
The Perse School (Singapore) now runs admissions through its own site. Parents apply, upload documents and pay online, and every enquiry lands in HubSpot. The school site covers every year group from Pelicans to Sixth Form, and the marketing team edits it themselves. The school has been on our care plan since March 2025, and we handle its hosting, forms, integrations and SEO as the campus moves into its second phase of building.
What we learned
Sequence by the client’s deadline, not ours. The school’s deadline was the application window, not the launch. Shipping the form months before the site meant admissions never waited on design.
A new school is a moving target. Leadership, photography and page content all changed during the build. Sprints with a weekly call kept the work visible, but the forms and HubSpot connection should have been locked and tested before launch day, not the week after.
Impact & outcomes
pages given meta titles and descriptions
The team behind this project
Shaan Nicol
Director
Roaldo Felipe
Project Manager
Kultar Singh
Senior Designer
Lendl Trazo
Senior Web Developer
Veena Danggalan
Account Manager
