Case StudyNo. 005
A one-million-page-view site, replatformed with zero traffic loss.
Marriage Helper (marriagehelper.com)
Marriage Helper had one of the largest marriage-help libraries on the web, running on WordPress and Elementor. It was slow on mobile, where 87% of their readers are, and unmaintainable after the developer who built it moved on. We rebuilt it and moved every URL without losing traffic.
475
URLs migrated
414 posts, 53 pages, 8 archives, every one redirected.
Zero
Traffic lost
Organic clicks held through the cutover and came out ahead.
+418%
AI answer visibility
First thirty days after launch.
87%
On mobile
Which is what the old build was worst at.
What we inherited
Hundreds of articles built up over years, a deep library on a subject people search at the worst moment of their lives. All of it on WordPress and Elementor, and all of it heavy. Pages carried dozens of scripts. On a phone it crawled, which mattered more than anything else, because 87% of the people who find them are on a phone.
The harder problem was that nobody could touch it. The developer who built the site had moved on, and neither the marketing lead nor the technical lead ran WordPress. Simple updates took days, or they just did not happen.
Why the search problem was not a ranking problem
Organic clicks were down year over year, but the rankings had held. That combination tells you something specific: the clicks were going to AI Overviews and AI answers, not disappearing to a penalty.
The old site gave AI engines almost nothing structured to cite. No clean schema, no answer-shaped content, nothing that made it easy to quote. The fight had moved from ranking to being the cited source, and the site was built for the previous fight.
The rankings were fine. The site just was not quotable.
The part that made me nervous
Rebuilding a site this size, live, with this much accumulated search equity, is the kind of project that goes wrong quietly. You do not find out you broke it for six weeks, and by then the damage is done.
So it was staged and reversible at every step. Commerce was already running somewhere else, which meant the website was not load-bearing for revenue, which meant we could move carefully instead of gambling.
What we built
A static build on Astro, deployed on Netlify. No database to go down, no plugin stack to maintain, no WordPress developer required to change a headline.
Every one of the 475 URLs was inventoried and mapped before anything moved: 414 blog posts, 53 pages, 8 category archives, each with a redirect written and tested. Structured data went in properly, content got reshaped so an answer engine could actually quote it, and the conversion tracking that had been broken on the old site was rebuilt so the funnel could be measured at all.
- ChatGPT
- Perplexity
- Claude
- Gemini
What happened
Traffic held through the cutover and came out slightly ahead, which is the whole game on a migration this size. Nothing dropped, nothing 404ed, no ranking cliff at week six.
The bigger change was visibility in AI answers, up 418% in the first thirty days. Marriage Helper now surfaces in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini on questions where it did not appear at all before. Same library, same expertise, finally in a shape the engines could cite.
And the site is maintainable by the people who own it. That was the actual point.
Certain you just need more leads? So were they.