AKvertise

The starting point

AKvertise is a social media advertising agency that runs paid campaigns across Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and more, and we’ve worked together since 2014. Its old WordPress site held years of work: about 100 blog articles, author and topic archives, feeds, and short links the agency’s speakers share at conferences.

The new site needed to present the agency well without throwing away the search visibility that content had built.

What I built

• A new design for the agency’s services, about, case studies, and contact pages, plus pages for its Social Ad AKademy community and shop.
• The full blog, moved across from WordPress with its authors, categories, and tags, and searchable from every page.
• A free advertising budget pacing calculator, built into the site.
• Short links for conference talks that label each visit, so the agency can see which talk sent someone to the site.
• A contact form that sends inquiries straight to the agency.

Moving without losing ground

A move off WordPress is where sites quietly lose search traffic. Old addresses break, or a page survives but loses its title or half its text along the way.

Before the switch, I assembled a list of 287 addresses the old site served, from a crawl of the live site, archived copies of its sitemaps, and its redirect rules. Every one was checked against the new site. Articles kept their original addresses, and old feeds and sitemaps point to their new equivalents. I also built a crawler that compares the old and new sites page by page, checking that titles, canonical tags, and the articles themselves made it across.

Measured with permission

The agency’s existing Google Analytics property carried over, so its reporting history continues. Analytics and the advertising pixel only run for visitors who accept cookies. Decline, and neither loads.