Notarin Dr. Nicola Hegerfeld
German privacy rules shaped much of our redesign of the notary website of Notarin Dr. Nicola Hegerfeld in Krefeld. The office advises on property, inheritance, gifts, company law, marriage and family matters and lasting powers of attorney. It also certifies signatures and documents. Dr. Hegerfeld took over the practice on the Ostwall from Dr. Hartmut Schlieper and keeps the deeds of her predecessors. The site is in German. Clients can use it to prepare for an appointment, with fillable questionnaires and answers to common questions.
- CMS: WordPress
- Theme: Hello Elementor child theme with Elementor Pro
- Integrations: custom Google Maps consent gate, custom spam protection plugin for the Elementor Pro contact form, locally served fonts, FluentSMTP, NoSpamProxy with Microsoft 365 mail, Google Search Console
- Live site: notarin-hegerfeld.de
In Krefeld, the office’s notary website was built on a premium WordPress theme called Bridge. It also carried a slider plugin and add-on packs, and its form used Contact Form 7. The office wanted a new look. It also wanted to keep all of its content, which filled 23 pages, on the same domain. New page addresses would have needed redirects.
The office’s privacy notice added a second limit. It makes the visitor’s consent the legal basis for Google Maps and has its own section on Google Fonts. A standard map embed ignores that. It pulls Google’s scripts, map tiles and fonts the moment a page opens, before the visitor has agreed to anything. On a fresh template, a stock map widget would have sent data to Google on every visit.
What we did:
On the rebuilt Elementor Pro site of a Krefeld notary’s office, Google Maps waits behind a consent gate we wrote, and our own spam plugin guards the contact form.
All 23 pages moved, URLs unchanged
We built the new layouts in Elementor Pro on a Hello Elementor child theme. Then we carried every page of content into them. Each page kept its old address on the same domain, which meant no redirects. We set up the FAQ in topic tabs, from property and inheritance through to costs. We also rebuilt the forms page around the client questionnaires. A new favicon went in as well. The only plugins the pages load now are Elementor, Elementor Pro and our own spam plugin. The slider and the add-on packs are gone.
Privacy rules on a German notary website
Every Google map on the site now waits behind a consent card that we wrote. The card names Google Maps and links to the privacy notice. It offers one button to load the map and one to decline. A single click on accept loads every map on the page, and the visitor’s browser remembers the choice. The fonts come from the site’s own domain rather than Google’s servers. Until the visitor accepts, a page view makes no request to Google at all.
The contact form needed its own protection. We wrote a plugin for the Elementor Pro form. It adds an invisible honeypot field and a form token that runs out after five minutes. Each visitor can send at most two messages a day, and the plugin blocks any submission that fails these checks. Stopping bots at a public form is also the job of our free WooCommerce security plugin on WordPress.org. It scores every checkout attempt before the order is created.
Mail, search and launch
Outside WordPress, we recovered the domain’s DNS. We put NoSpamProxy in front of the office’s Microsoft 365 mail, and the site’s own messages now go out through FluentSMTP. At launch we added the site to Google Search Console and requested indexing for the new pages. We checked the pages on desktop and on phones as well. The result is a notary website that kept every old address. It loads Google Maps only after consent and turns away form spam.
- 23 pages carried into the new design, each still on its old URL
- In a test of the directions page, 0 of 27 requests left the domain before map consent
- Fonts served locally, with no link to Google Fonts on any page
- Contact form protected by our own honeypot and rate limit plugin
- Office mail on Microsoft 365 behind NoSpamProxy, site mail through FluentSMTP
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