A 1,056-page migration, done without downtime

1. The situation

   The firm’s website was not the firm’s. It sat on a vendor platform under a monthly contract, with no export path and no access to anything below the surface of the page editor. Nobody at the firm could say how many pages were live. Content had accumulated for the better part of a decade — practice areas, attorney bios, location pages, an entire blog — added by a series of vendors and marketing coordinators, none of whom left an inventory behind. The site was slow on a phone. Parts of it were years out of date. None of it could be moved without the vendor’s cooperation, and the vendor had no reason to cooperate. That is the ordinary condition of a mid-size defense firm’s website, and it is invisible from the inside: the firm sees the homepage, not the nine hundred pages behind it.

2. The audit

   Before anything moved, we crawled the site end to end and built an inventory of every URL it served — what it was, what linked to it, and whether anything still pointed at it from outside. The crawl returned 435 broken links. It also surfaced 377 blog posts sitting in an archive the site’s own navigation no longer reached: published, indexed, and invisible to anyone who did not arrive by search. The finding that mattered most was quieter. Lead capture forms on 313 pages were failing — submitting cleanly from the visitor’s side, delivering nothing to anyone at the firm. No error, no bounce, no alert. The forms had simply stopped, and because nothing announced it, nobody knew. We tested every form on the site before rebuilding a single one.

3. The migration

   1,056 pages moved onto static infrastructure the firm owns outright. Every URL that existed before still resolves: 557 redirects were mapped page by page, so no ranking and no inbound link was lost in the move. Images were re-encoded and resized to what the layouts actually use, cutting image payload 64% with no visible loss of quality. Forms were rebuilt against a real sending service and tested with live submissions into the firm’s inboxes — a confirmation message on the page proves nothing. The migration ran without downtime, because the new site was built, crawled, and link-checked in full before the DNS change. The cutover itself was a single record change with a verified site already waiting behind it.

4. Compliance

   Florida Bar advertising rules govern everything a firm publishes, and the rules do not care that a page was written by a vendor three years ago. Every template in the rebuild — practice areas, attorney bios, location pages, the homepage — was reviewed against Rules 4-7.21 and 4-7.18 with the firm’s own compliance attorney before launch. The division of labor was explicit, and it is the same on every engagement: we execute; your counsel opines. The attorney reads the rule and decides what the firm can say. We build to that decision, hold it across a thousand pages, and put an automated check in the build that fails if required language goes missing. Nobody on our side interprets the rules, and nobody at the firm has to hand-inspect a thousand pages to find out whether the standard held.

5. Email infrastructure

   A firm’s email is part of how a carrier finds it and most of how a carrier answers it, and it fails as silently as a broken form. We implemented SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on the firm’s domain and verified them from outside — sending real messages and reading the received headers, not just confirming that a record existed. Authentication is unforgiving about detail: two SPF records where there should be one is a hard failure, and a DMARC policy tightened before every sending source is authenticated will quietly quarantine the firm’s own mail. We inventoried each service sending as the firm, brought them under authentication, and only then moved the policy. The result is ordinary and worth stating plainly: mail from the firm authenticates, and it reaches the inbox.

6. The carrier-facing microsite

   In July 2026 we built and launched a separate five-page site aimed at one reader: the claims manager or panel coordinator deciding where to send a file. It is not a marketing site and it does not read like one. It answers what a carrier actually asks — what the firm defends, in which venues, with which attorneys, and how a file gets opened. No consumer copy, no practice areas the firm would not want on a panel submission. It exists because the main site has to address several audiences at once, and this is the audience that assigns the work. A carrier evaluating panel counsel can now be sent one URL written for them, and the firm can cite it in a submission.

By the numbers

• 377 blog posts recovered from a buried archive and returned to the site
• SPF, DKIM, and DMARC implemented and verified from outside the domain
• Every template reviewed against Florida Bar Rules 4-7.21 and 4-7.18 with the firm’s compliance attorney before launch
• A separate five-page carrier-facing microsite built and launched, July 2026
• No downtime at cutover; no URL left unresolved

The firm is not named here. Approval to use the name hasn’t been given, so it isn’t used — which is the answer any firm would want given about its own engagement.