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Case study | Website redesign and technical SEO

Rebuilding a Content-Heavy Site With AI, Without Losing the SEO

How Corelead redesigned a senior executive's WordPress site and kept every URL and the structure behind it.

1,663

URLs checked before and after launch

4

intentional permanent redirects

79%

lighter article page

At a glance

Client
A senior marketing executive with a large, established content archive
Platform
WordPress, kept
Scope
Custom theme redesign, technical SEO safeguards, email deliverability, launch and verification

The challenge

The site looked dated and ran on a heavy theme. It also held more than 1,300 published posts and over 1,600 URLs, plus years of search visibility and structured data.

The obvious modern move was to feed a prompt into an AI site builder and launch a fresh site by the end of the day. That would have been fast. It would also have meant starting over on everything the old site had earned.

The decision

We started with a different question: what must not change? The answer was the content, the URLs, the SEO work, and the blog.

All of it already lived on WordPress, and WordPress was doing its job. The problem was only the theme on top. So we kept the install and replaced just the theme.

Before: heavy theme

After: new theme, same URLs

Abstract illustration, not a screenshot of the site.

How we did it

  1. 1

    Baseline first

    We captured screenshots, speed tests, and the status of every URL before touching anything.

  2. 2

    Build on staging

    The new design was built and tested on a copy, never on the live site.

  3. 3

    Redirect plan

    Four URLs were meant to change, each with a permanent redirect. Everything else stayed put.

  4. 4

    AI where it helps

    AI accelerated design and development, under constraints we set: a design system, fixed templates, and a checklist.

  5. 5

    Verify after launch

    We re-ran the same checks and compared the results.

What changed

  • A custom WordPress block theme with five templates: Home, services, About, the article archive, and the article page
  • A new visual system built for readability, with text and button contrast checked against accessibility standards
  • Self-hosted fonts and leaner code, with spam-protection scripts loaded only on pages with forms
  • Structured data for the author and their publication, plus breadcrumb markup, so search engines and AI tools can read who the author is and how pages connect
  • A cleaned-up tag archive: 334 tags audited, duplicates merged, strays removed
  • Email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), and contact forms corrected to deliver to the right inbox
  • Social share previews that pull each page's own title, description, and image
  • An unprotected form endpoint found and closed

Results

URLs
1,663 URLs checked before and after launch: 1,659 unchanged and 4 intentional permanent redirects. No page was lost.
Lighter pages
The Home page is about 20% lighter on mobile (about 14% on desktop), and a measured article page is about 79% lighter.
Tags
334 reduced to 328, with redirects in place.
Email
All three authentication checks pass, and form notifications reach the right inbox.

The lesson

AI makes redesigning a site easy. It doesn't make it safe. A website is an asset built over years, and the design is only the surface. The teams that get this right decide what must stay before they decide how it should look.

Planning a redesign? Talk to Corelead before you rebuild.

Before anything is rebuilt, we check your URLs, top pages, structured data and baseline, so nothing you have earned gets lost.

Get a free pre-redesign audit Contact us