A 12-year-old site rebuilt without losing a single URL

The problem

The site had served the business for about twelve years and ranked well, but it was built on an old framework where pages lived inside templates and widgets rather than as editable content. The 40-link mega-menu was hard-coded. Every change needed a developer. The brief was clear: make it editable and modern, keep everything, and do not lose the search traffic.

Protecting what already ranked

Before touching anything we cloned the site and built a full inventory: 91 published pages, every URL and every SEO title and description. The URLs all end in .html, an unusual pattern, and 39 pages had hand-set addresses. The rule for the rebuild was that every one of them keeps resolving exactly as before.

The rebuild

• A custom Gutenberg block theme, kept light to protect page speed. Pages are now real content the team edits in the block editor.
• The hard-coded mega-menu replaced with a three-level menu that mirrors the old structure.
• A modern design the client approved, then adjusted at their request to keep the original orange and plain, highly readable type their customers were used to.
• Five quote, information and trial request forms rebuilt and protected from spam.
• Market pages kept to their original wording, so the copy Google ranked stayed in place.
• A customer logo wall of 72 schools, hospitals, universities, businesses and government sites.

Core Web Vitals

A later performance pass removed duplicate stylesheets and an unused reCAPTCHA script that was loading on every page (about 300 KB). Homepage requests fell from 34 to 20. Adding real dimensions to 136 images took layout shift to zero, and the hero image was rebuilt to serve phones a properly sized WebP. Images across the site are now served as WebP.

Results

• Every one of the 91 pages rebuilt, with every .html URL kept.
• A site the team can edit themselves, menu included.
• Homepage requests down from 34 to 20, layout shift at zero, and desktop performance at 92.

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