Since 2026
Getting a tree surgeon off WordPress without losing his rankings
A one-year-old site built on an abandoned theme, with an American contact page still live. Full rebuild, migration off WordPress, and local pages built on verified facts.
old addresses mapped and redirected one by one, so the domain keeps its seniority
stock photos removed: the site now shows only his own jobs
town pages, each opened on a local rule verified in a public source
The context
Souleymane Traoré is a climbing tree surgeon west of Paris. He already had a website, put online a year earlier and untouched since. It was not an empty shell: his logo, his photos, four service pages, articles. But twelve theme demo pages — in English, carrying the address of an American company — were indexed; his contact page showed a fictitious Virginia phone number; the menu was dead on every inner page; and the email address in his footer contained a typo, which may have been losing him enquiries for thirteen months. His real problem was not the site: he was being captured by contractors squeezing his prices, and he wanted direct calls from private customers.
The workflow, in motion
What becomes of every address on the old site
A rebuild is not judged on the new site: it is judged on what happened to the addresses search engines already knew, one by one.
- /elagage-abattage.html301/prestations/elagage
- /devis-gratuit.php301/contact
- /promo-hiver-2019410page removed, and owned as such
- /index.php?p=12301/prestations/entretien-jardin
42
old addresses handled
0
dead link left behind
A page that really is gone is declared gone (410): lying with a redirect to the home page costs more than saying it.
What we did
- check_circleA full audit of what existed before proposing anything: 42 addresses inventoried, 148 media files examined one by one, weight and load times measured.
- check_circleMoving off WordPress onto our own stack, offered free of charge in the quote: the abandoned theme and its plugins meant endless security updates we did not want to bill indefinitely.
- check_circleAn exhaustive redirect plan: 301s to the new pages for everything carrying real content, and a 410 for the twelve demo pages — not a redirect to the homepage, which engines treat as an error.
- check_circleSorting his images: fourteen of the twenty-four came from stock libraries, often renamed after his company by the previous supplier. They added nothing in search, being already on thousands of sites, and were billable by their owner.
- check_circleInternal linking built on three families of pages that answer one another — the town, the trade, the job — with a written admission rule: a town only gets a page if it brings a verified local fact the others do not have.
- check_circleVisibility in AI assistants included at no extra cost and with no guarantee: declaration to Bing, explicit opening to assistant crawlers, structured data, consistency of his details across third-party sources.
What changed
- trending_upThe site no longer publishes a single false detail: no American address, no fictitious phone number, no indexed demo page.
- trending_upEvery job he photographs becomes a page. It is the only surface of the site that grows with his activity, and one a competitor cannot imitate: it is not written, it is photographed.
- trending_upHis town pages cite the prefectural order, the local planning classification or the permit regime that applies. Someone wondering whether they may fell their tree finds the answer on his site.
- trending_upNothing on the site commits him wrongly: no certification, no price list, no unverifiable customer review. What we could not prove is not displayed, and that rule is enforced in the code.
The services involved
This engagement drew on the following expertise. Each has its own page, with its method and its deliverables.
Other case studies
HAY HuaHin
Since 2024A studio rental in Hua Hin, Thailand. Site rebuilt, hosted, deployed and optimised by us — and it is our own money going into the Google Ads campaigns.
Read the case studyarrow_forward
Andrée Putman
Since 2025Reissued furniture, interior architecture projects, collaborations: a bilingual site that shows a body of work and sells pieces, without keeping visitors waiting.
Read the case studyarrow_forward
Vins de Pomponette
Since 2026An organic estate in the Minervois, a presentation poster and four wines. A site built from scratch — design, development, SEO, hosting — without a single cookie or a request to a third party.
Read the case studyarrow_forwardLet's talk about your project
Thirty minutes is enough to tell whether we are the right fit. We reply within 48 hours, and we say no when it is not for us.