For sites that are five years past their last good year
A WordPress Rebuild That Keeps Your Rankings
Your site still works, mostly. But it's slow, the plugin warnings keep stacking up, and the person who built it is long gone. A rebuild is the obvious answer and also the scary one, because the thing you're most afraid of losing is the one thing you can't see: the position you've earned in Google.
We rebuild sites so that doesn't happen. Everything the site has earned comes with it.
The situation
You're afraid to touch it, and that's fair
The site went up five or six years ago. It loads slowly on a phone. The dashboard has a row of updates you've been ignoring because the last time somebody clicked one, a page broke. Nobody currently on your payroll knows how it's put together, so the safest thing to do has been nothing.
The part that actually keeps you from moving isn't the design. It's the fear that a rebuild quietly costs you your rankings, and you find out in a month when the phone stops ringing. That's a real risk on a badly run rebuild. It's also the specific thing a rebuild should be built to prevent.
The plan comes first
Nothing gets built until you've agreed to the plan
Before anyone writes a line of code, we put together the plan and you sign off on it. That means a page-by-page inventory of what's on your site today, the visual direction for the new one, the accessibility standards it will meet, and a complete map of every old web address to where it lands on the new site. That map is what carries your Google rankings across instead of letting them evaporate.
The plan gets locked before the build starts. That's the whole reason these projects don't drift, and it's why you always know what you're getting.
The architecture
What the new site is made of
The new site is built on modern architecture rather than WordPress. In practice, that means most of what's currently going wrong just isn't there anymore.
- No plugins to update, and none to get hacked through.
- No database sitting behind the site waiting to be broken into.
- No page-builder weight loading on every visit, which is why these sites come out fast and stay fast. Google measures speed, and your visitors feel it.
- Your content moves over page for page. What the site says stays the same unless you want it changed.
- Your hosting bill usually drops, often to almost nothing, because this kind of site doesn't need the hosting WordPress needs.
Launch day
Switching over without holding your breath
On the day the new site goes live, we check that every old address actually forwards to its new home rather than assuming the map did its job. Then the new site gets a full quality pass: broken links, how it renders on a phone, speed, accessibility. After that we watch your search data to confirm the rankings held. You don't have to take our word for it, and neither do we.
Proof
A rebuild you can go look at
Father Nature Landscapes is one of these. You can read the whole case study, from the old site through the migration to what's live now. The clearest proof is the part that's gone: their old WordPress hosting has been shut off entirely. There's nothing left running behind the scenes.
Questions people ask before they commit
Will we lose our Google rankings?
That's what the address map is for. Every address on your old site gets pointed at its new home before the build starts, we verify the forwarding actually works on the day we switch over, and we watch your search data afterward to confirm nothing slipped. If something moves, we see it and fix it.
Can we still edit our own site and publish blog posts?
Yes. Your content lives in simple editable files, and blog publishing keeps working the way you'd expect. For most clients we handle updates as part of ongoing work, so you can hand us the changes instead of doing them yourself if you'd rather.
What happens to our old content?
It gets migrated, not regenerated. Nobody rewrites your pages behind your back or feeds them to a machine. What your site says today is what it says after the rebuild, unless you tell us you want something changed.
How long does it take?
It depends on how big your site is, and anyone who quotes you a timeline before looking at it is guessing. The plan phase is where that gets settled. Once we've inventoried your pages, you'll have a real schedule instead of a hopeful one.
Start with a look at what you've got
Send us your website address and tell us what's been bothering you about it. We'll look at what's there and tell you what a rebuild would actually involve. You'll hear back within one business day.
Part of Cascade's Website Design & SEO practice.