A Three-Site Migration and Rebuild for Guide Dogs

We planned the engagement as one migration of three sites. Every site moved to WP Engine on the same platform and the same hosting standard, so the federation would come out the other side with a common base to build from.

We audited each site before rebuilding anything, working through the page inventory, the templates in use and the integrations attached to each environment. That audit is what the migration schedule was built from, and it gave the client a clear view of the scale of each site before work started.

We rebuilt 484 pages in the new page builder, 160 for the national site, 175 for Victoria and 149 for Queensland, migrating content, page structure and blocks across. Alongside the pages, 491 news articles, 20 events and 20 case studies were carried over, bringing the total to 1,015 content items.

A different builder means the result is not a pixel for pixel copy of the old site, so we set that expectation with the client at handover and used the rebuild to correct problems the sites had carried for years, particularly mobile layout and alignment issues. Standardising the three sites on one platform means a fix or an improvement built once can be applied across the federation, rather than being rebuilt three times in three different ways.

Enquiry and donation forms were rebuilt and remapped to Salesforce, then tested end to end so submissions arrived against the right records. We implemented Cloudflare Turnstile across all three sites to stop automated form spam without putting a puzzle in front of a supporter, which matters on sites built for accessibility.

We worked through the Mailgun sending configuration for the state organisations, correcting DNS records so SPF, DKIM and DMARC align on the sending domain. Authenticated email is what keeps notifications and supporter communications out of spam folders, and it protects the domain from being spoofed by anyone else.

We handed over staging sites with a handover report and a Pages Built and Tested register, so the client could sign off page by page rather than test blind. All three sites went live in a coordinated launch, followed by a warranty period where post-launch items were logged, prioritised and fixed.

Guide Dogs now runs its national and state websites on one WordPress platform and one hosting standard, with forms feeding Salesforce, spam protection in place and authenticated email leaving the correct domains. The federation has a common base to build from, so future work benefits all three organisations rather than one at a time.

• 484 pages and 1,015 content items migrated and rebuilt to a single go-live date
• All sites consolidated onto one hosting and security standard
• Enquiry forms mapped and tested end to end into Salesforce
• Form spam controlled without an accessibility barrier for users
• Email authentication corrected across sending domains
• Content teams can build new pages from a shared block library without developer support
• Long-standing mobile and layout issues resolved during the rebuild