The Client
Wildswimming.co.uk is one of the UK’s best-known resources in the wild swimming space, built up over more than a decade by award-winning writer Daniel Start. Over that time the site had built up a genuinely large content base: guides, regions, and around 1,000 custom “map” and “region” posts created by the original theme — a huge number of individual location pages, many of which were still pulling in real organic impressions and clicks in Google Search Console.
What We Were Dealing With
The content was valuable. The foundation underneath it wasn’t:
- An outdated version of PHP
- An old, template-based theme that had effectively stopped working
- A plugin ecosystem no longer compatible with modern WordPress
This is the kind of site where one wrong step during migration can wipe out a decade of accumulated search equity. The brief: move the whole site onto modern WordPress with GeneratePress, clean up the years of orphaned and thin-content pages that had piled up, and come out the other side with SEO fully retained — ideally improved.
Why This Was Hard
- ~1,000 custom post types with no clean export path. The old theme’s “maps” and “regions” content type wasn’t standard WordPress content, and none of the old plugins carried over to a modern setup.
- Real organic value on the line. Plenty of the older, unremarkable-looking pages were still generating clicks and impressions. A “migrate the important stuff and drop the rest” approach wasn’t good enough — everything with search value had to be accounted for individually.
- Years of backlinks pointing at old URLs. Careless redirects would have meant losing referral authority built up over a decade.
- Zero tolerance for a ranking dip. The client’s income and reputation depend on search visibility, so the migration had to be close to invisible from Google’s side — no traffic cliff, no re-indexing chaos.
Our Process
1. Audit before touching anything. We built two Google Sheets before any migration work started: top pages by clicks and impressions from Google Search Console, and a full backlink sheet listing every page with external links pointing at it. These became the master checklist for the whole project — a page wasn’t “done” until it was checked off individually, which is what let us guarantee that nothing with real SEO value got lost in the shuffle.
2. Manual, page-by-page verification. With 1,000+ posts and pages in play, this wasn’t a bulk-export job. Each page was opened and checked individually, using a Chrome extension to open batches of URLs at once and speed up what would otherwise have been a painfully slow, one-tab-at-a-time process.
3. Migrating standard content. Since none of the old site’s plugins were compatible with the new setup, we used WordPress’s built-in Import/Export tool for the bulk of standard posts and pages — no third-party migration plugin, just the native tool, run carefully and checked manually afterward.
4. Rebuilding the “maps/regions” content type. The old theme’s custom post types had no clean modern equivalent, so we rebuilt them using Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) with a new, logical URL structure (/maps/post-name), preserving both the content and a crawlable URL pattern for the site’s most distinctive content type.
5. Images. Given the age and inconsistency of the original media library, we imported many images manually rather than trusting an automated batch process — trading speed for reliability, which mattered given how many images were tied to specific location pages with existing search visibility.
6. Staging environment and new hosting. We built a full staging site on new hosting and tested it thoroughly before cutting the live site over, keeping the migration isolated from production until it was proven stable.
7. Cleanup. Alongside the migration, we identified and removed years of accumulated orphan pages and thin, low-value content — rather than carrying it all over by default just because it existed on the old site.
8. Post-launch verification. After going live, we manually checked every page and post again for broken links and successful migration — no automated crawler standing in for direct verification.
Results
The new site went live on 30 March 2026, and we monitored performance closely for months afterward through Google Search Console:
- SEO fully retained — no ranking or traffic drop following the migration
- Only positive movement in the months after launch
- Two separate Google algorithm updates rolled out within 2–3 months of the migration, and neither had a negative effect on the site’s performance — a strong signal the technical foundation and content structure came through the transition in good health
- Zero reported broken links or lost pages, thanks to the manual, checklist-driven QA process
Put together, a 10+ year-old, technically broken WordPress site was moved onto a modern, GeneratePress-based setup — 1,000+ custom posts, blog content, and pages all accounted for — with search visibility fully intact on the other side.
Takeaway
When migrating a website, keep the same menu and footer structure as the old site. Large structural changes to site-wide navigation can significantly reshape internal linking patterns overnight, and that kind of sudden shift can sometimes cause Google to re-evaluate — or reset — how it ranks the site. Preserving that structure gives Google fewer reasons to treat the new site as a fundamentally different entity from the old one.
