Joshua Mikhaiel

Joshua Mikhaiel is an established documentary wedding photographer with a personal, recognisable brand and years of exceptional work. His WordPress website already had a strong blog. My job was to preserve that depth, give his photography a better home and make it easier for couples, search engines and AI agents to discover it.

I rebuilt the website in Astro on Cloudflare, with a design shaped around Josh’s personality, his distinctive lettering and the feeling in his photographs.

Beautiful photographs, smaller downloads

The site uses JPEG XL, usually shortened to JXL: a modern image format designed to preserve fine photographic detail while using less data than a traditional JPEG. For a wedding photographer, that means photographs can look rich and detailed without making visitors download unnecessarily large files, especially on a phone connection.

Once Chrome added JPEG XL support, joining Safari, I made Josh’s website an early adopter of JPEG XL in wedding photography. The site generates JPEG XL, WebP and JPEG versions automatically, and the browser chooses a format it supports. Visitors do not need an extension or a setting change to see the photographs.

Josh uploads one original. The website prepares the different sizes and formats for him, while keeping the original photograph separate from the smaller files used on the public site.

Built around mobile, with a considered dark mode

More than 60% of Josh’s visitors use a mobile device, so phone layouts, responsive image sizes, touch-friendly galleries and the path to making an enquiry were central to the build. Photographs can be explored in a lightbox, with keyboard navigation and Pinterest sharing.

The design also follows the visitor’s light or dark preference. Dark mode uses a warm, dark canvas and Josh’s gold logo, giving the photography and branding the same care as the light version.

Making an established archive easier to discover

Josh’s existing wedding stories are an asset. The migration preserves that archive and its established addresses, with redirects for pages that moved. Structured venue, vendor and location content connects the work to the places and people involved.

Venue and regional pages bring related wedding stories together, while guides lead readers to Josh’s photographs from those places. Someone researching a wedding location can find relevant examples of his work and explore the full celebrations behind them. The structure gives the existing blog more useful paths into search results.

Ready for people and agents

The site serves readable Markdown when an agent requests it, provides an llms.txt index and uses structured data to describe Josh, his services, photographs and locations. Discovery information and crawler rules help search and answer engines find and interpret the public content.

On 12 November 2026, it scored 100/100 in the Is It Agent Ready content-profile assessment, passing all seven enabled checks across discoverability, content and bot access control.

The working website also includes an editor for stories, photographs and draft previews, Studio Ninja enquiries, reviews, and a playful 404 page that teaches visitors how camera settings affect a photograph.

Early results

In the first month after launch, we have seen encouraging increases in visibility in Google Search Console, visitors to the site and enquiries. We’re assessing the longer-term results of search engine optimisation (SEO) and answer engine optimisation (AEO) over three to twelve months, as the new site and its content become established.

Hosting has gone from hundreds of dollars a year to US$5 a month, while giving Josh a modern, professional home for his photography and an editor for keeping it current.

A fresh PageSpeed Insights test on 12 November 2026 recorded:

Check	Mobile	Desktop
Performance	83	99
Accessibility	96	96
Best practices	100	100
SEO	100	100

I’m proud of how the build brings Josh’s work and personality together with the practical foundations of a modern wedding industry website.