Builds, rebuilds, and getting off a theme that’s holding you back
New WordPress sites, and rescues of sites that were put on a heavy premium theme five years ago and now can’t be maintained, can’t be made fast, and can’t be changed without something breaking. That second one is most of our work.
What we take on
New site builds
Built on a lightweight theme with a sensible content structure, so it’s still maintainable in three years.
Theme migrations
Moving off a bloated premium theme without losing content, URLs or rankings. Tested on a staging copy first, every time.
Rebuilds that keep every URL
A full redesign where the URL structure is preserved or properly mapped and 301’d, so your search traffic survives the launch.
Legacy cleanup
Orphaned shortcodes, dead theme options, custom post types from a theme you no longer run, remnants from plugins removed years ago.
Custom functionality
Post types, taxonomies, templates, REST endpoints — and when it’s big enough to deserve one, a proper plugin instead.
Speed work
Core Web Vitals, render-blocking assets, autoload bloat, plugins loading on pages that don’t use them.
Theme migration, done without drama
We’ve run this process repeatedly on our own ten-site portfolio before ever charging anyone for it. It’s not complicated, but almost everything that goes wrong goes wrong because a step got skipped.
- Audit before touching anything. Which pages use builder shortcodes, which custom post types belong to the theme, what’s referencing files inside the theme folder.
- Move theme-folder assets out. Images and scripts living in the theme directory vanish the moment you switch. They go into uploads first.
- Everything on a staging copy. Noindexed, tested, deleted afterwards. The live site doesn’t move until the copy works.
- Convert theme custom post types to real posts with 301s, so portfolio and testimonial content doesn’t disappear with the theme.
- Clean the database. Dead theme options are a measurable performance cost — on one of our sites, removing remnants from three retired themes cut autoload weight from 1,131 KB to 540 KB.
- Hunt orphaned shortcodes after the switch. Raw, unrendered shortcode text sitting in page content is the most common post-migration embarrassment, and it’s invisible until someone visits the page.
Rebuilding without losing rankings
Rewriting your content doesn’t cost you rankings. Changing or deleting URLs does. Those are two different things, and conflating them is why most redesigns lose traffic.
- Same URL, new content — nothing is lost. Backlinks, history and rankings stay.
- URL retired with a relevant 301 — the link value carries across to the new page.
- URL deleted with no redirect — that’s the only real loss, and it’s permanent.
So every rebuild we run starts with an inventory: every URL, its search performance, and its backlinks, before a single word gets rewritten. Then a decision per URL, then the content. More on that under SEO & technical marketing.
How a build runs
Audit and inventory
What’s on the site now, what’s worth keeping, what’s quietly broken. For a migration or rebuild this includes a full URL map.
Written scope and fixed quote
Including what’s explicitly not in scope. Surprises cost both of us.
Build on staging
You review it on a real copy of your own site, not a design mockup.
Launch, with redirects live the same minute
Then 30 days of watching Search Console for 404s and crawl errors, because that’s when migration problems actually surface.
Common questions
Will we lose our Google rankings?
Not if the URL map is done first. Pages that keep their URL keep their history; pages that are retired get a 301 to the closest relevant page. The only way to lose rankings is to delete URLs without redirects, or to mass-redirect everything to the homepage, which Google treats as a soft 404.
Can you work on our live site, or do you need a copy?
A copy, for anything structural. Small fixes can be done live; theme migrations and rebuilds never should be.
Do we have to rebuild all our pages?
Usually not. If your pages are built with a page builder, the content generally survives a theme change — that’s often the cheapest path, and we’ll say so when it is.
How long does a migration take?
It depends on how much legacy there is, not how many pages. A site with heavy builder use, theme custom post types and three retired themes in the database takes longer than a bigger site that’s been kept clean. The audit tells us which you have.
What happens afterwards?
You get the site, documented. If you’d rather not manage updates yourself, there’s a care plan, but it’s optional.
Send us the URL
Tell us what’s wrong with the site as it stands and we’ll tell you whether it’s a fix, a migration or a rebuild — and roughly what each would cost.