Background
Wildswimming.co.uk is one of the UK’s best-known resources in the wild swimming space, built up over more than a decade. It belongs to the award-winning writer, Daniel Start. Over that time, the site had accumulated a large, valuable content base: guides, regions, and, notably, around 1,000 custom “map” and “region” posts created by the original theme. This was a huge number of individual location pages, many of which were still pulling in organic impressions and clicks in Google Search Console.
The problem was the foundation underneath all that content. The site was running on:
- An outdated version of PHP
- An old, template based theme that had effectively stopped working
- A plugin ecosystem that was no longer compatible with modern WordPress
It’s the kind of site where one wrong move during migration can wipe out years of accumulated search equity. The brief was clear: move the entire site to modern WordPress with the GeneratePress theme, clean up the years of orphaned and thin-content pages that had built up, and come out the other side with SEO fully retained, ideally improved.
The Challenge
- ~1,000 custom post types with no easy export path. The old theme’s “maps” and “regions” content type wasn’t standard WordPress content, and none of the old site’s plugins carried over to a new setup; they were incompatible.
- Real organic value at stake. Many of the older, obscure-looking pages were still generating clicks and impressions. A generic “migrate the important stuff” approach wasn’t good enough; everything with search value needed to be accounted for individually.
- Backlinks pointing at old URLs. Years of link-building and organic mentions meant a lot of external links pointed at specific old pages. Losing or redirecting these carelessly would mean losing referral authority.
- Zero tolerance for a ranking dip. The client’s income and reputation are tied directly to search visibility, so the migration had to be close to invisible from Google’s perspective: no traffic cliff, no re-indexing chaos.
The Process
1. Audit before touching anything
Before any migration work began, two Google Sheets were built:
- Top pages by clicks and impressions, pulled from Google Search Console
- A full backlink sheet, listing every page with external links pointing to it
These two sheets became the master checklist for the entire project. A page wasn’t considered “done” until it was checked off, one at a time. This is what made it possible to guarantee that not a single page with real SEO value was dropped or lost in the shuffle.
2. Manual, page-by-page verification
With ~1,000+ posts and pages in play, this wasn’t a job for a single bulk export. Each page was manually opened and checked individually. A Chrome extension was used to open batches of URLs at once, speeding up what would otherwise have been an extremely slow, one-tab-at-a-time process.
3. Migrating standard content
Since no plugins from the old site were compatible with the new setup, the default WordPress Import/Export tool was used to move the bulk of the standard posts and pages: no third-party migration plugin, just the built-in tool, run carefully and checked manually afterward.
4. Rebuilding the custom “maps/regions” content type
The old theme’s custom post types didn’t have a clean modern equivalent, so these were rebuilt using Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), with a clean new URL structure: /maps/post-name. This preserved both the content and a logical, crawlable URL pattern for the site’s most distinctive content type.
5. Images
Given the age and inconsistency of the original media library, many images were manually imported rather than relying on an automated batch process, trading speed for reliability, which mattered given how many of these images were tied to specific location pages with existing search visibility.
6. Staging environment and new hosting
A full staging site was built on new hosting before anything went live. The live site was then cut over to this new hosting once the staging build was fully tested and verified, keeping the migration isolated from the production environment until it was proven stable.
7. Cleanup
Alongside the migration itself, the client also wanted the years of accumulated orphan pages and thin/low-value content cleaned up. Content with little to no value was identified and removed as part of the same project, rather than being carried over by default just because it existed on the old site.
8. Post-launch verification
After going live, every page and post was manually checked again for broken links and successful migration: no automated crawler substitute, just direct verification.
Results
The new site went live on 30 March 2026, and the results were monitored closely for months afterward via Google Search Console.
- SEO fully retained, no ranking or traffic drop following the migration
- Only positive movement observed in the months following launch
- Two separate Google algorithm updates rolled out within 2 to 3 months of the migration, and neither had a negative effect on the site’s performance, a strong signal that the site’s technical foundation and content structure came through the transition in good health
- Zero reported broken links or lost pages from the manual, checklist-driven QA process
The picture shows Google Search Console data for wildswimming.co.uk. The red arrow indicates the date, 30 March 2026, when the new setup went live and the migration was completed.
Taken together, this points to a fully successful migration: a 10+ year-old, technically broken WordPress site was moved onto a modern, GeneratePress-based setup, with 1,000+ custom posts, blog content, and pages all accounted for, and the site’s search visibility came out the other side intact.
Key Takeaway / Tip
When migrating a website, keep the same menu and footer structure as the old site. Large structural changes to site-wide navigation can significantly alter your internal linking patterns overnight, and in some cases, this kind of sudden change can cause Google to re-evaluate (and sometimes reset) how it ranks the site. Preserving this structure gives Google fewer reasons to treat the new site as a fundamentally different entity from the old one.