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: sandbox build began 2026-06-10; DNS cutover to production completed 2026-06-24 — 14 days from first commit to live on the real domain
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 in a controlled window on 2026-06-24 using apex A records to the Amplify distribution. The site has served continuously from CloudFront since.
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 held through the migration — the whole point. Search Console for the 28 days ending 2026-08-18 shows 18,315 impressions and 83 clicks, versus 17,697 impressions and 77 clicks in the prior 28-day window. Impressions and clicks both moved up across the replatform instead of falling off a cliff, which is the failure mode this project existed to avoid.
- Brand and core commercial terms intact: “united contract services” holds position 1.6, “united contractor services” position 2.0, “commercial cleaning san jose” position 11.3. 126 distinct pages are still earning impressions, including legacy URLs arriving through the 301 map.
- Trailing 12 months (spans both platforms): 445,957 impressions and 682 clicks at an average position of 34.0 — the baseline we are now working to compress.
- Operational: WordPress maintenance burden eliminated — no plugin patching, no PHP attack surface. Site is versioned in Git with staged deploys and reviewable diffs.
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.