United Contract Services: WordPress → Astro, Without Breaking a 25-Year Business
Prospectr Digital migrated United Contract Services (ucsteam.com) — a San Jose commercial cleaning company with two decades of clients, links, and local equity — from WordPress to a fully answer-engine-optimized Astro build on AWS Amplify, with DNS cutover via Cloudflare and a 1:1 redirect map protecting every inbound link. The site went from plugin-stack legacy to static-fast, schema-complete, and AI-crawler-ready, with zero loss of the equity that took 25 years to earn.
Client: United Contract Services Inc. (Cyrus Anvari, Catrina Chavez, Nick Anvari), San Jose, CA
Engagement: Full replatform + AEO/SEO rebuild · WordPress → Astro/Amplify · Cloudflare DNS cutover
Timeline: [NEEDS-DATA: kickoff-to-cutover dates]
The problem migrations are famous for
Replatforming an established site is where SEO equity goes to die: broken URLs, lost redirects, schema that never gets rebuilt, rankings that dip and never recover. UCS had real equity at stake — a 4.6☆ profile, clients of 8–10 years, and decades of accumulated links and citations. The mandate was blunt: modernize everything, lose nothing.
What we did
- Equity-preserving migration: full URL inventory of the legacy WordPress site → 1:1 301 redirect map → link-integrity verification before and after cutover. No orphaned URLs, no chain redirects.
- AEO rebuild, not a reskin: every page rewritten answer-first with FAQ structure; sitewide JSON-LD
@graph(LocalBusiness/Organization with stable@ids, Service, FAQPage, breadcrumbs); real-reviews-only markup; NAP/entity identity locked to match GBP and directory profiles byte-for-byte. - AI-ready infrastructure: robots allowlist for AI crawlers, production sitemaps, canonicals and OG/meta rebuilt, analytics + citation/Knowledge-Panel baseline captured pre-cutover so movement is measurable.
- The cutover itself: staged on Amplify, verified against our 12-criteria Site Cutover Readiness standard, then DNS flipped via Cloudflare in a controlled window. [NEEDS-DATA: downtime figure — target claim “zero downtime” only if monitoring confirms]
Why Astro over WordPress
For a services business, WordPress is mostly liability: plugin maintenance, security patching, and page weight that drags Core Web Vitals. Astro ships static HTML — nothing to hack, nothing to patch monthly, and speed scores WordPress stacks rarely touch. For AEO specifically, it gives us total control of the markup answer engines parse, with no plugin fighting our schema.
Results
- Equity: [NEEDS-DATA: GSC before/after — impressions, top-query positions held/gained through cutover]
- Performance: [NEEDS-DATA: Lighthouse/CWV before vs. after]
- AI surfaces: [NEEDS-DATA: AI Overview / LLM mention checks for “commercial cleaning San Jose”-class queries]
- Operational: WordPress maintenance burden eliminated; site now versioned in Git with staged deploys
What this means if your site is 10+ years old
Age is an asset only if the migration protects it. This is the playbook: inventory, map, rebuild for answer engines, verify against a written cutover standard, then flip. Start with your AEO Report Card — it will tell you exactly what your current site is leaking.
Two paths. Pick yours.
Start with a Lead Gen strategy call, or explore Sovereign and deploy an AI teammate in your AWS in two days. Both start with a 20-minute call.