Ten years of blog posts moved, and not one lost

Who they are

Foot-Tech Academy runs children’s football coaching across Leeds. Luke Towning started it in 2014, and it’s grown into group sessions, toddler classes, girls’ football, one-to-ones, holiday camps and parties. I’ve worked with Luke for years.

What needed fixing

The site was on WordPress and it was showing its age. Slow, and always needing something updating.

The tricky bit was the blog. Over ten years they’d written 532 posts, and those posts bring in a lot of parents from Google. Change the web addresses and that traffic goes. On top of that, every booking form relied on a WordPress plugin to talk to their CRM, so taking WordPress away would have broken all of them.

What I built

I moved all 532 posts across at exactly the same addresses, so as far as Google’s concerned nothing changed. Old category and tag pages point to the right place too.

Then I rebuilt all six booking forms (group sessions, First Touch, holiday clubs, parties, one-to-ones and the free taster), connected them to the CRM again, and tested each one before it went live. The homepage and main pages got rewritten around what parents search for, the tracking came across so they can still see which ads bring bookings, and there’s a simple editor so they can keep blogging without touching any code.

Where it’s at now

Live at foot-techacademy.co.uk, faster, and with nothing to keep updating. We’re talking about what comes next for them now.