The bigger and older your website, the more scared you are to touch it.

That was Immobilière Pujol.

A real-estate agency in Marseille. Twenty years in business. Around 5,000 listings online. Roughly 6,000 web pages Google already knew by heart. About 20,000 visits a month and close to 600 leads landing in their inbox.

The website was not a brochure. It was the business.

So when we talk about how to migrate a website without losing SEO, this is the project we think of first. Because everything that could go wrong was on the table.

The fear that kept them stuck

Their site ran on an old WordPress.

Aging plugins. A fragile setup. And the worst part: the provider who built it had gone quiet. Calls unanswered. No real support.

So they were stuck.

They knew the site was outdated. They knew it was slow. But touching it felt like defusing a bomb. One wrong move and a decade of Google rankings could vanish. And with the rankings, the leads. And with the leads, the salaries.

That fear was rational. Sitting still felt safer than acting.

It kept them frozen for years.

It was not a website. It was an operations machine

Here is what most people miss when they look at a site like this.

Immobilière Pujol is not a small shop. It is around 80 people, split across four very different businesses under one roof:

Sales: agents selling property.
Rental: finding tenants.
Property management (gestion locative): running owners’ rented flats day to day.
Co-ownership management (syndic): handling the legal and financial side of apartment buildings.

Each one has its own pages, its own content, its own audience. A seller and a landlord are not looking for the same thing, and the site has to speak to both without getting in each other’s way.

Then there are the listings. Thousands of them, and they do not come from one place. They pour in from several property feeds, each in its own format, and the site ingests them and updates itself automatically, every hour, with no one touching a thing.

And the leads. Nine different contact forms across the site, and every single one has to land in the right department. A sales enquiry that drops into the rental inbox is a lost deal and an annoyed team. So each form is routed to the exact people who should answer it.

So this was never “a real-estate website”. It was the front door of an 80-person operation. Four businesses, thousands of auto-syncing listings, nine routed lead funnels, 6,000 pages. That is the machine we had to move without breaking a single part of it.

Suddenly “just rebuild it” sounds a lot less casual.

Why “rebuild it” is the wrong plan

Most people hear “old website” and think “let’s rebuild it, fresh and modern”.

That is exactly how you lose your rankings.

When you have 6,000 pages Google trusts, the goal is not a shiny new site. The goal is to move every single one of those pages to a new home without Google noticing the move. Same content. Same addresses. Same leads.

So we did not approach this as a rebuild.

We approached it as risk management.

The new site had to be faster and cleaner, yes. But first, it had to be invisible to Google. Same pages, same place, just a better engine underneath. That is the real skill in a WordPress to Astro migration: not the new tech, the careful handover.

The method: we blocked our own launch

Here is the part we are proud of.

We mapped every URL on the old site. All 6,000. Then we checked, page by page, that each one had a home on the new site.

And we held the line.

We blocked our own launch until every SEO-critical detail from the old site was rebuilt on the new one. Not “most of it”. All of it.

The district navigation by arrondissement, the way buyers browse Marseille neighbourhood by neighbourhood. The internal links on sold listings, the quiet wiring that tells Google how the site fits together. The “sold” and “closed” banners on old listing pages, the history that kept those pages ranking.

None of that is glamorous. None of it shows up in a pretty mockup.

But that is the stuff that holds your rankings in place. Skip it to launch faster, and you find out three weeks later when the traffic drops.

We chose method over speed. Every time.

The launch: a nervous Sunday

The cutover happened on a weekend.

We switched the DNS on a Sunday, on purpose, to keep disruption to the bare minimum. Fewest people browsing, fewest leads in flight, least to lose if something went sideways.

Honestly, it is a nervous moment. You flip the switch and you watch.

Then the traffic kept flowing. The leads kept coming. Google followed the new site without a hiccup.

Zero pages lost at cutover.

You can see the full technical breakdown, the stack, the speed scores, the numbers, on the Immobilière Pujol case study. This post is about the human side of it.

They own everything, the way it should be

This is the part that matters most to us.

Immobilière Pujol owns their website outright. The hosting account is in their name. The code lives in their own repository. They hold full technical documentation.

For us, that is not a favour. It is simply how a serious agency hands over a project. Your site and your code are yours. Your team can take them to any developer, at any time, no permission needed.

We say it plainly because they had learned the opposite the hard way. Their previous setup left them dependent and stuck, unable to move. We build so that can never happen again.

A website should never hold a business hostage. Ownership is the standard, not the reward.

What this means for your business

If you are sitting on a big website you are scared to modernise, read this part.

The fear that justified waiting is mostly gone.

A clean migration is not luck anymore. It is method. Map every page. Match every page. Rebuild every detail that holds your rankings. Switch when the timing is quiet. Hand the keys back to the owner.

Do that, and a 20-year-old site becomes a fast, modern one without losing a single visit.

The old way kept you frozen. The right method gets you moving again.

That is the whole point of our platform migration work: you get a better, faster site, and you keep every ranking and every lead you spent years earning.

If your site is the thing that feeds your business, and you have been too scared to touch it, let’s have a quick chat. No pressure, just a clear look at what is at risk and what is not.

You can see the live result at www.immobiliere-pujol.fr.