Mario Testino

Who doesn't know Mario Testino OBE, in the media industry, one of the legends who has photographed everyone from Kate Moss to Princess Diana and even shot for Gucci, Burberry, Versace, Chanel, and Dolce & Gabbana. He has worked for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and museums across the globe, including the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. And a photographer of his level needs a website that is not just artistically stunning but also flawlessly editable.

When we first inherited the Mario Testino project, they were in a state of crisis. Broken Vercel pipelines, 200% overages on Sanity, and a botched migration with 160+ missing redirects.

We jumped straight in, without a second thought. We helped them to set up a company repo, reconnect severed connections, and started tackling the Sanity overage issue.

Testino’s site was already built on Sanity, which might make you think things would be easier. But here is the spoiler: they weren’t. The whole project was sitting on a pile of deprecated dependencies, the kind that break if you so much as look at them. Imports were busted, libraries were abandoned, and updates were basically a threat.

So we ripped everything back to vanilla Sanity. Stripped the excess code, removed unnecessary libraries, rebuilt the editorial flow, and dropped in Live Content API so edits didn’t feel like “press publish and wait five minutes for the universe to respond.” While refactoring, we fixed every redirect, cleaned up navigation so crawlers could actually read it, and made sure creators and search engines got the same smooth experience. Then we rewrote every page, image implementation, and data query from scratch.

Geoff and the Testino team saw the TurboStart Sanity template experience and wanted exactly that. So we gave them exactly that. Now they can add exhibitions anywhere, spin up blogs and press releases, and reorder content without waking up a developer at 11 pm.

We also experimented with Geoff on layouts and added the scoop section. It is a tiny spotlight for “never-before-shared” Testino stories. And because this is photography, we dialled in image hotspotting so every shot looks flawless on anything from an iPhone to a retina monitor that costs more than our rent.

SEO needed a little TLC after the previous migration missed all the redirects. With Francesco, their SEO expert, we worked hand-in-hand to rebuild structured data with JSON-LD, clean up crawl paths, and get Google to stop ghosting the site. We also slapped on Vercel Bot ID because scrapers treat photography sites like an all-you-can-eat buffet. With the foundation finally stable, we shipped two new sections, Selected Press and MT World, and the site now behaves the way Testino’s work deserves.

The Testino team was genuinely thrilled, so much so that Geoff Cooper's words about our work now sit proudly on our homepage. The site went from broken and unpredictable to fast, stable, and fully editor-friendly. Francesco, their SEO expert, tracked improvements daily as we restored redirects and implemented proper JSON-LD. Organic visibility climbed back, schema is now set-and-forget, and we don’t want to jinx it… But the whole site crawls flawlessly.

Operationally, the upgrade was immediate. The team can add exhibitions, publish press releases and blogs, reorder content however they want, and rely on hotspotting to keep every image perfectly framed. No broken layouts, no surprise dev emergencies. We’re now adding AI-powered upgrades like automatic alt-text, richer SEO content, and future e-commerce functionality.