Why

Organic clicks had fallen 37% while average ranking improved, and almost all remaining organic traffic was branded. That prompted an investigation of click-through and page experience. The site loaded shared CSS, a hosted runtime, and jQuery on every page. Those were concrete performance costs to remove, though the traffic trend alone does not establish a cause. The client also wanted text edits to move through pull requests. The rebuild preserves the existing content and design while reducing transfer weight and adding a repeatable verification process.

Constraints I worked inside

• No DNS, form, or tag-management changes until cutover. The build lived on a preview with layered indexing controls.
• Never submit a live form. Form markup was verified by byte-matching it against the live DOM.
• Pre-existing live-site bugs (a broken form field, a broken redirect, an orphaned tag container) were reproduced faithfully, not silently fixed. Fixing them was scoped as a marketing decision, separate from the migration.

Engineering

1. ExtractEvery page, collection, and asset pulled through the source platform's API. Images recovered at original quality rather than the lossy converted versions the platform served.
2. Convert17 CMS collections mapped to Astro content collections with validated schemas.
3. Verify384 screenshot comparisons against production, 12,629 internal links checked, redirect coverage and metadata verified across all 128 pages.
4. Cut weightjQuery, the hosted runtime, third-party plugins, and consent and tag scripts removed from the render path. Homepage transfer fell from 1,437 KB to 838 KB.
5. Protect the repoProtected main with required review and no force-push, tested deliberately by trying to break it.

Delivery

• Cutover runbook with pre-reviewed DNS batches, certificate pre-validation to avoid an HSTS lockout, a go-live checklist, and a one-record rollback that takes five minutes.
• Plain-language editing guide so non-technical staff publish through GitHub pull requests and Claude Code.
• Engineering documentation covering the pipeline, the QA harness, and the deploy path.

Numbers

This portfolio site is on the same stack: Astro static build on Cloudflare Pages.