Helping Hands: Scaling a nationwide WordPress platform on AWS

Overview

Helping Hands Home Care is one of the UK’s longest established care providers, delivering home care services across 160 local branches. Its flagship WordPress site serves as a vital point of contact for families seeking care services, requiring high availability, rapid loading times, and stringent web security. 

To modernise their web infrastructure and protect against online threats, Helping Hands partnered with Lambert Labs to introduce additional AWS services. Lambert Labs deployed AWS WAF, Amazon CloudFront, and Elastic Load Balancing in front of the WordPress application layer. Through rigorous planning and structured deployment runbooks, Lambert Labs delivered a successful migration that protected overall platform availability and business continuity.

Lambert Labs took us through every stage, from POC to cutover, working closely with our internal team throughout. Steve Hooper, Digital Product & Martech Lead, Helping Hands

Opportunity / Customer Challenge

Helping Hands Home Care manages a high traffic WordPress platform supporting thousands of care enquiries and branch searches every day.

Introducing additional security and traffic management layers to an established, content heavy WordPress platform is highly non-trivial. Moving beyond a basic lift-and-shift, the project required navigating complex technical intricacies (including SSL certificate termination, dynamic page routing, caching behaviours, and origin request policies) without corrupting data or impacting site availability.

The primary challenge was to design a robust, multi-tiered AWS architecture while ensuring that the live migration and DNS cutover caused minimal impact to daily care enquiries.

Solution

To address the complexities of introducing new AWS services to the platform, Lambert Labs developed a phased engineering strategy, beginning with a Proof of Concept (PoC) to validate the technical compatibility of modernised AWS infrastructure with Helping Hands’ WordPress setup. Under this design, web requests are handled via WAF and CloudFront.

Making significant changes to an active, content rich WordPress application requires overcoming numerous technical subtleties without causing data loss or service downtime. To manage these complexities in a structured manner, Lambert Labs authored standardised staging and production deployment runbooks. A dedicated staging environment was established to rigorously test routing policies, origin request behaviours, and CloudFront caching prior to live deployment. During the production cutover, Lambert Labs executed a coordinated content freeze, spun up the multi-tier production environment in under two hours, and collaborated closely with Helping Hands’ technical leadership to update DNS records. This disciplined, runbook-driven methodology ensured a controlled transition, protecting core functionality and availability for public site visitors.

Lambert Labs planned the migration around how we actually work, so the families who rely on our website never saw a break in service. They took us through every stage, from proof of concept to cutover, and worked closely with our internal team throughout. We’re now on a platform that will scale with us as we grow. (Steve Hooper, Digital Product & Martech Lead, Helping Hands)

Outcome

The migration successfully transformed Helping Hands’ web infrastructure into a secure, resilient, and highly available platform.

Through meticulous runbook planning and controlled execution, the live cutover preserved high availability, ensuring users maintained access to the website throughout the transition. Furthermore, Lambert Labs established a clear staging-to-production pipeline, equipping Helping Hands’ development and content teams with a stable, repeatable deployment workflow for the future.

Migrating an established WordPress platform to use new AWS services involves far more than moving code. Taking a structured, runbook-driven approach let us deliver the change with no loss of service, and left the team with a repeatable deployment process to build on. (George Lambert, CEO, Lambert Labs)

About Helping Hands

Helping Hands Home Care is one of the UK’s longest established providers of home care and live-in care services. Operating for over 35 years with 160 local branches, Helping Hands supports thousands of individuals across England and Wales by delivering compassionate, tailored care that enables customers to live independently in their own homes.