Moving a 547-Article Magazine Off a Failing WordPress Host in a Week, With Every URL Kept
Sans Pareil Online had sixteen years of articles, 6,351 photographs and a hosting plan with eight days left on it. The host was pushing a paid migration to another server. We took a full copy without needing her logins, rebuilt the magazine on a browser editor she owns, and switched the domain over the day before the plan ended.
547
Articles migrated
1,448
Redirects verified
48 → 82
Mobile performance
> THE PROBLEM
Our audit of the WordPress site scored 71/100 with 32 issues. The home page weighed 4.7MB, mobile performance was 48 with a 6.1 second Largest Contentful Paint and a layout shift score of 0.26, the Organization schema was the plugin default with nine fields empty, and HTML had leaked inside the JSON-LD so the article markup was invalid. 1,220 tag pages, most with one or two posts, were competing with the articles for crawl budget.
The hosting was the urgent part. Crazy Domains had the plan expiring on 11 October and was pressing a paid move to a new server plus a three-year renewal. Robecca did not know how to export the site or the database, and the credentials she had were sent in plain text.
She also wanted her magazine back: the colour-block look of her original design, no bylines on her own posts, no archive page, and the ability to rearrange the home page herself without asking anyone.
> WHAT WE BUILT
We pulled everything public from the site’s own API without using her logins: 547 articles, 14 pages, 38 live categories, 1,224 tags, comments and 6,351 original images. Each referenced photograph was re-cut to three widths as WebP plus the original and uploaded to a CDN bucket, 4,673 originals in all.
The new site is Astro with Sanity as the editor. Articles, sections, pages and writers are documents; the home page is a stack of full-bleed colour blocks she orders in the Studio (lead story, Today, section strips, trending, sign-up, temporary sections). Five brand colours sampled from her old site, headlines in a heavy condensed variable font, cards at magazine proportions.
URLs stayed identical for every article and section. For everything else, 1,448 redirect rules, including the 1,150 thin tag pages, which 301 to each article’s primary category. The feed and admin addresses point at their new homes. A post-build check confirms every redirect target exists.
Cutover: DNS moved to a Cloudflare zone checked record by record against the live host (all five Google MX, SPF, DKIM, verification), nameservers changed at the registrar, certificate issued within the hour. Both contact forms were tested live into her inbox before the email went out. The whole job, from first export to live, took seven days.
TECH STACK:
> THE RESULTS
- Live on sanspareilonline.com seven days after the first export and a day before the old hosting lapsed, with no paid migration
- 547 articles and 14 pages migrated with every article and section URL unchanged; 690 URLs in the new sitemap
- 1,448 redirect rules, verified against the build, so no old link lands on a 404
- Mobile performance 48 to 82, Largest Contentful Paint 6.1s to 4.0s, layout shift 0.26 to 0, home page 4.7MB to 1.3MB, measured with AdSense and Analytics running
- Desktop performance 93, Accessibility 97, SEO 100; Article and BreadcrumbList schema on every story
- Publisher edits her own home page, menu, footer and pages in the browser; first round of her edits built and live the same evening
Export first, argue later. When a host is counting down the days, the first job is a complete copy you control. Everything public came out through the site’s own API in an afternoon, before any design decision was made.
"The site is so crisp, and it loads so fast."
- Robecca Leyden, Sans Pareil Online
> QUESTIONS THIS PROJECT ANSWERS
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