Athena SCF

Where we started

Athena SCF is a registered SCF (independent financial advisory firm). The site ran on WordPress with Elementor Pro and WooCommerce: 375 pages, 282 articles, 28 popups and a small shop. Every page loaded part of the page builder’s 173 stylesheets and the Elementor scripts. It was heavy to maintain and every plugin update was a risk.

The brief was clear: change everything underneath, nothing on top. Same pages, same copy, same images, same look, and above all no lost addresses, because many pages have ranked on Google for years.

What we did

We downloaded the WordPress site and wrote the tools that convert it into an Astro project. Astro produces static HTML pages: on each visit there is no database to query, no plugins to update and no admin panel to protect.

The articles stayed in HTML. We tried converting all 282 to Markdown, but only 29 came through intact: the others lost tables, videos or interactive blocks. The images also stayed in their WordPress paths, because changing them would have broken external links and the Google Images presence of around 3,900 files.

To make sure the site really was identical, we compared screenshots of the old and new pages pixel by pixel, automatically. The comparison found faults the eye missed, such as a button shifted by 35 pixels or videos losing their 16:9 ratio.

Removing WordPress also means that what it did on its own, nobody does any more. We rebuilt it piece by piece: site search, RSS feed, redirects, and the llms.txt file that AI assistants read. The contact forms now write to the business platform, separating people asking for a consultation from people signing up to the newsletter, and the shop goes through the platform’s checkout, which reads the price back from the database and does not trust the one sent by the browser.

Coolify publishes the site on our servers every time the code changes.

How it’s built

• Astro, with content generated by the conversion tools
• 1,366 compiled pages across pages, articles, archives, popups and previews
• Site search with Pagefind, which runs in the searcher’s browser
• FAQ structured data taken from the visible text: 1,989 questions on 400 pages
• A sitemap that leaves out pages marked noindex on its own
• Audio player on all 282 articles
• A “Check who is contacting you” page, against people who claim to represent the firm without belonging to it
• Docker and Coolify for publishing

Outcome

The site has the same addresses, the same copy and the same look as before, but no longer depends on WordPress, Elementor and WooCommerce. Pages with questions and answers declared to Google went from 13 to 400, and every answer is checked word for word against the text the reader sees. Anyone who fills in a form gets a confirmation, and the request reaches the business platform with an alert to whoever needs to reply.