Website for a children's French school in London: Club Petit Pierrot, from WordPress to Ghost

Client

Club Petit Pierrot — London's longest-established French immersion programme for young children, founded in 1993 by Stella Bataille. Fun French lessons for babies and children from 6 months to 8 years, taught entirely in French by native-speaking teachers, across centres in Chelsea, Fulham and Notting Hill.

Industry

Education and training — an independent language school for children, serving London families

Services provided

• WordPress to Ghost CMS migration
• Managed Ghost CMS hosting
• A site structure built around terms, age groups and venues
• A shop where no card data touches the website
• Newsletter and review integration
• Team training and ongoing support

Project objective

A school with thirty-three years of reputation had a website that had become a liability rather than an asset.

The old WordPress site carried the usual accumulated weight: a stack of plugins and a theme to keep patched, an admin nobody enjoyed opening, and a structure that no longer matched how the school actually sells. Club Petit Pierrot doesn't sell one thing — it sells five different formats to four different kinds of family, across three neighbourhoods, on a timetable that changes every term.

Three objectives:

1. Make the offer legible. A parent lands on the site with one question: what can my child join, at their age, near me, starting when? The old site made them hunt for it.
2. Let the team update its own term dates. A school's website is wrong the moment a camp fills up or a term shifts. If that needs an agency, it stays wrong.
3. Take the website out of the payments firing line — no card details, ever, on the school's own site.

The challenge

• Reorganising an offer with five class formats, holiday camps, private tuition, events and a shop, without a menu that overwhelms a parent on a phone
• Migrating a long-running WordPress site without losing the pages that families and Google already knew
• Selling physical products from a school site without turning it into an e-commerce platform to maintain
• Meeting the documentation expectations of a children's provider — safeguarding, not an afterthought
• Handing the keys to a teaching team, not a technical one

Solutions implemented

Ghost instead of WordPress, and what that removes

The rebuild moved the school onto Ghost with a customised theme. The gain worth naming isn't a feature — it's what is no longer there: no plugin stack, no theme marketplace, no third-party code running inside the site with full access to it. That is the single largest source of vulnerability on a typical WordPress site, and on this site it simply doesn't exist any more.

We run the hosting, the Ghost updates, the daily backups and the SSL certificate. The school runs the school.

A structure that answers a parent's actual question

The offer is now split the way families think about it, each format a real destination:

• Les Ateliers des Petits — parent/carer and child groups, for the youngest
• Les leçons des Grands — drop-off groups in Fulham, Chelsea and Notting Hill
• Les classes des Francophones — FLAM drop-off groups for francophone and bilingual families
• Holiday Camps — French immersion weeks for 3 to 8 year olds in Chelsea and Fulham
• Private Tuition & Schools — at home, online, or delivered into other schools

Plus Events, a Shop, and a Contact & Venues page that does the geography properly — because for a class a four-year-old attends weekly, the deciding factor is often which side of the river you live on.

A shop where no card number touches the site

The shop sells a Pierrot puppet, a tote bag, a schoolbag and a set of original French songs and rhymes. It is built from ordinary Ghost pages, and every checkout is a hosted Stripe payment link. The buyer leaves for Stripe, pays there, and comes back.

That decision is worth dwelling on, because it is the one most small businesses get wrong. There is no cart plugin, no payment module, no stock engine — and therefore no card data on the school's own site, and nothing in that chain for us or the school to keep patched. Class enrolments likewise run on the external booking platform the school already used.

One nice detail the format made possible: each product carries two payment links — delivered to you and the cheaper collect in class. A parent picks at the point of buying, with no shipping logic to build.

Taking payments on a site you'd rather not have to secure? Book a free 30-minute video call — no commitment, and we'll look at whether your setup can be simplified out of harm's way.

Trust, which for a children's provider is documentation

A parent choosing who spends an hour a week with their three-year-old checks different things from a normal buyer. So the site carries a Safeguarding Policy and a Zero Tolerance Anti-Harassment Notice as real, findable pages alongside the privacy and terms pages — and the team page states DBS checks and safeguarding training plainly.

Alongside that, the proof: the school's appearance in the Tatler Address Book 2026, a press and awards page, collected parent reviews on the site and a route to leave a Google review.

A blog that answers the questions parents actually ask

The school publishes pieces like "My child always replies in English when I speak French to them — what can I do?" and "Starting French early gives your child a lifelong advantage."

This is the part that earns search traffic. A page called French classes in Fulham competes with every other French class in Fulham. An article answering the exact worry a bilingual parent types at bedtime competes with almost nothing — and it reaches the family a year before they are ready to enrol.

A step-by-step approach

1️⃣ Mapping the offer — five class formats, camps, tuition, events and shop laid out before a single page was built.

2️⃣ Migration from WordPress — content moved across, URLs preserved where they carried visibility, the rest redirected.

3️⃣ Theme and structure — age groups, venues and terms made navigable, with the brand carried through.

4️⃣ Shop and policies — Stripe payment links per product, safeguarding and legal pages published.

5️⃣ Training and go-live — a working session with the team, then launch in March 2026.

Who this applies to

This pattern fits any language school, music school, sports club, nursery, tutoring practice or children's activity provider: a rotating timetable, several formats, several venues, and a small team with no technical staff.

Two things decide whether such a site works. First, the team must be able to change term dates themselves — a website nobody can update is a brochure that goes out of date in public. Second, keep payments off your own site. If a customer's card details never reach your servers, an entire category of risk stops being your problem. Hosted payment links are less sophisticated than a full e-commerce build, and for most small businesses that is precisely the point.

What the client runs herself

The team publishes its own term dates, camp announcements, events and blog posts, and adds shop products with their payment links. Term after term, the site keeps up with the timetable without a ticket to raise or a developer to book.

We handle hosting, updates, backups and support.

Conclusion

Club Petit Pierrot has been teaching French to London children since 1993. The website now does what a thirty-three-year-old school needs: it explains a genuinely complex offer in a way a parent understands on a phone, it stays current because the people who know the timetable are the people who edit it, and it carries a shop without carrying the risk that usually comes with one.

Fewer moving parts, fewer things to patch, and nothing on the site that a school shouldn't have to look after.

Do you run a school, a club or a children's activity?

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