Migration & consolidation
Bring your blog, marketing site, B2B pages, and regional sites into a WordPress platform your team can operate. Plan the content, routes, and connections together.
When the structure becomes the constraint
A blog lives on one host. The main website has another publishing process. Business and regional teams maintain their own pages. Each change crosses several systems, and nobody has a complete picture of what it touches.
A migration is the opportunity to make those relationships explicit. Choate Catalysts works with marketing and engineering teams on the content structures, frontend, integrations, and operating decisions behind the move.
The work can sit inside an Embedded Ops engagement, with ongoing platform support scoped around what the team needs afterward.
Scope the whole move
The scope follows the existing system: its content, its dependencies, and the people who need to keep working through the change.
Inventory posts, pages, media, taxonomies, and custom fields before choosing the new content model. Resolve duplicate slugs and conflicting categories. Define reusable templates and editing permissions around the people who will use them.
Planning outputContent inventory, template requirements, and an import plan.
Record the URLs that exist today and decide what happens to each. Review redirects, canonical URLs, internal links, sitemaps, and indexability together. Keep a baseline for the pages and queries that already bring useful visitors.
Planning outputA reviewed URL map and checks for old and new destinations.
Follow the full path from a form submission to its destination. Account for CRM fields, lifecycle subscriptions, consent, analytics events, and API connections. Give each dependency a test case and an owner before the switch.
Planning outputAn integration inventory with expected behavior and acceptance checks.
Rehearse the move in staging, agree how late content changes will be handled, and write down the release and rollback sequence. Assign responsibility for hosting, updates, monitoring, and fixes after launch.
Planning outputA release plan, recovery criteria, and an operating handoff.
Make the URL decisions early
Consolidating websites means resolving collisions and preserving useful distinctions. This decision table is a starting point for reviewing the URL map with the people who own the content.
| Existing content | Decision | Check before launch |
|---|---|---|
| An article moving from the blog host | Map the old article to its equivalent on the new site. | The redirect reaches the intended article directly; links and media still work. |
| Two pages with the same slug | Keep separate routes or merge the content deliberately. | The chosen destination serves the original audience and purpose. |
| Regional or language versions | Preserve the versions the business still supports. | Regional links, language annotations, and conversion paths match each version. |
| A page that is being retired | Choose a relevant replacement, or return a genuine 404 or 410. | The old URL does not redirect visitors to an unrelated homepage. |
Reference: Google’s guidance on site moves, redirects, and regional sites.
A working starting point
Use this to surface unresolved decisions with your team. Check off items as you review them; no account is needed.
For the content move itself, see the WordPress migration handbook. Database changes need tooling that understands serialized data.
Before the move
Yes, when their content, permissions, and operating needs fit a shared installation. The planning work is deciding what stays distinct: B2B and consumer journeys, regional content, form destinations, and editorial responsibilities. A single installation, WordPress Multisite, and separate sites solve different problems; the choice should follow those requirements.
Yes. Treat it as a URL migration as well as a content import. Decide the new paths, map individual articles and archives, update internal links, and maintain redirects on the old hostname. Check images and downloads too, especially when other websites link to them.
No one can guarantee that. Search visibility can fluctuate while changed URLs are processed. The practical work is to keep useful content available, provide relevant destinations, remove accidental crawl barriers, and monitor what happens after the move. A baseline makes that monitoring meaningful.
The decision depends on the work the sites do. Shared editing and reusable templates can favor consolidation. Separate ownership, release cycles, access requirements, or business processes can favor keeping properties independent. We establish those boundaries before recommending an architecture.
Content volume is only one input. Custom post types, theme and plugin dependencies, language versions, connected systems, URL changes, and approval requirements all affect the work. Bring the existing sites and any deadline to the first conversation so the assumptions can be made explicit.
Learn more about our capabilities in depth.