About the client
Nordmalingshus AB is a municipal housing company tasked with managing and renting out apartments in the Nordmaling municipality. Their portfolio covers rental apartments, sheltered housing and commercial spaces.
The tenants are a mixed group. There are local residents, the elderly, students and newly arrived families with different first languages. For a company with that broad an audience, the website becomes one of the most important contact points in the daily work.
It has to work just as well for someone looking for their first home, for the pensioner reporting a leaky faucet, and for the newly arrived family who needs to read their lease in their own language.
When Nordmalingshus reached out to Galea design, they had an old WordPress site that no longer met their needs. Neither for tenants nor for the staff responsible for keeping information up to date. The goal was a modern, accessible and fast platform that is easy to operate over time.
What we built
Frontend
Next.js 16
CMS
Sanity
Languages
5 langs + RTL
Lighthouse
100 / 100 / 100 / 100
Database
Neon Postgres
Hosting
Vercel Edge
Accessibility
WCAG AA
The challenge
The old WordPress site was built for a completely different need than what Nordmalingshus had in 2025. Several of the underlying problems couldn’t be solved with plugins or theme updates — they sat in the platform’s architecture itself.
The site existed only in Swedish, even though a meaningful share of tenants have a different first language. That meant important information about housing, maintenance reports and rental contracts didn’t reach everyone.
It wasn’t mobile-optimized. Since most visits today happen from a phone, that was a major problem for both prospective and existing tenants.
There was no FAQ section. Simpler questions ended up as emails or phone calls to customer service. Information for tenants was also scattered across pages that were hard to find.
Technically, the site relied on a long list of plugins that created security holes, forced constant updates and risked breaking on compatibility issues. The staff struggled to update content themselves, and changing a heading, phone number or news item often required help from a developer.
In sum, this was a platform that hindered the business instead of supporting it.
The solution
We rebuilt Nordmalingshus.se from the ground up with three priorities: usability, accessibility and self-service.
The frontend is built in Next.js 16 with React 19 and TypeScript. That gives server-rendered HTML, lightning-fast loading, and an SEO-optimized structure from the first byte. Styling is handled with Tailwind CSS 4, and the entire build chain runs on Turbopack for fast iteration and efficient deploys.
Content lives in Sanity CMS, a headless CMS that lets the staff update copy, images, news and full cards directly from a visual interface. Live editing means changes are visible in real time before they’re published. Staff never need to contact a developer to change a heading or post a service notice.
Multilingual handling runs through next-intl. The site is available in five languages: Swedish, English, Arabic, Farsi and Ukrainian. Arabic and Farsi render with correct right-to-left reading direction, which means the entire layout — icons, arrows and margins — is mirrored to feel natural to the reader.
All tenant information was gathered into a dedicated section we call "For tenants." It contains maintenance reports, routines, contact paths, information about your housing, and a quick entry to the existing tenant portal "Mina Sidor" (My Pages).
A new FAQ system with fuzzy search lets users find the right answer even when they’ve misspelled a word or searched with a slightly different phrase than what’s in the question. That cuts customer service load substantially.
The infrastructure is built on Vercel for global edge hosting, automatic scaling and zero downtime. We use Neon as a serverless Postgres database to handle subscribers and admin, Vercel Blob for secure file uploads, and Resend with Maily for transactional email.
Security is built in from the start. All user input is validated with Zod, free-form HTML is rendered through DOMPurify and sanitize-html to stop XSS, and authentication runs through bcryptjs and JWT. All interactive components are built on top of Radix UI, which delivers WCAG AA accessibility out of the box.
On the admin side, Nordmalingshus got their own panel for managing newsletter subscribers, form submissions and file uploads. Without dependence on plugins or third-party tools.
The results
Nordmalingshus.se reaches Google Lighthouse 100 out of 100 in all four categories. Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO. That’s a result fewer than one percent of all sites on the internet achieve.
The site loads to interactive in under a second, even on slow mobile connections. Accessibility is tested against WCAG AA and works for users with screen readers, keyboard navigation and impaired vision.
The SEO is structured from the ground up with semantic HTML, sitemap, robots, per-language metadata, and structured data. That makes the site ready both for Google and for AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
All old URLs from the WordPress site have been preserved through server-side redirects. No existing rankings or external links are lost.
The difference in daily operations is significant. The old site was Swedish only. The new one runs in five languages with RTL support. The old one wasn’t mobile-optimized. The new one is mobile-first by design. The old one had no FAQ. The new one has a searchable system with fuzzy matching.
Where WordPress required constant plugin updates and security patches, the new platform maintains itself. Where the old site took several seconds to load, the new one is under a second. Where staff used to need help for every change, they can now edit everything live.
The result is a digital platform that builds the brand and actually works as a tool. Tenants find what they need in their own language. Staff don’t have to contact developers for simple changes. Customer service gets fewer calls about things that are now explained directly on the site.
Nordmalingshus operates on a platform that is ready for many years ahead — without needing to be rebuilt again.
Visit the website
nordmalingshus.se