Prosperity Club

Prosperity Club: off WordPress, onto something that stays up

An ageing WordPress site rebuilt as a static site, then migrated without touching the client's email.

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What the migration actually involved

Media recovered from the old host

620 MB

five class recordings and two worksheets

Dead links found and fixed

19

none of them reported by anyone

DNS records changed to roll back

1

old site left untouched on its original host

The part that nearly went unnoticed

The cutover itself was uneventful — a DNS change, a certificate, mail left where it was. What mattered came after. Every class recording on the site was still linked at its old address on the previous host, so the moment the domain moved, all of them returned “not found”. Thirteen articles linked each other the same way. Nobody had reported it.

Those links survived the build's own link checker because they were written as full web addresses rather than site-relative paths, and the checker treated anything with a domain in front of it as somebody else's problem. That is the kind of gap worth fixing once, properly: the checker now verifies them too, so the same class of breakage fails a build instead of a visitor.

How it ran

1. Before anything else
   Take a real backup first

   The host's own backups turned out to be fifty-byte empty files. A full archive was pulled and verified before anything else happened.

2. The rebuild
   Rebuild as static

   No database, no plugins. Pages generate from typed content, so a fix lands everywhere at once.

3. Cutover day
   Move one DNS record

   Mail was deliberately left on the original host, so email was never in the blast radius.

4. The week after
   Then go looking for what broke

   Recovered the missing media, repointed nineteen links, and added redirects so old bookmarks and search results still resolve.