Filippo Angeloni: case study

Where we started

This is Filippo Angeloni’s personal site: finance articles, videos, newsletter, calculators and press coverage. It ran on WordPress with Elementor Pro, Yoast, Thrive, MailPoet, CartFlows and WooCommerce. The numbers: 617 articles, 134 pages, 1,292 tags, over 5,400 media files and 1,964 addresses in the sitemap.

The goal was more control and a connection between the site and the business platform. The constraint was to lose nothing in SEO terms: titles, descriptions and addresses had to stay identical, and no page could disappear.

What we did

First we took a snapshot of the old site address by address, saving the HTML of every page. Then we downloaded the content and converted the articles to Markdown, a simple text format you can edit without an admin panel.

One detail made the difference: we took the metadata from the served pages, not from the WordPress API. Yoast returns different descriptions to the API from the ones it shows Google, and taking them from there would have made all 617 articles wrong without anyone noticing.

We redesigned the 134 pages built with Elementor one by one in Astro, starting from an already approved redesign.

To check the result we wrote two automated tests. The first compares the <head> of every old and new address. The second checks what does not sit on a single page: sitemap, robots.txt, RSS feed, structured data. The site went live only with zero serious differences.

Contact forms, newsletter sign-ups and blog comments now reach the business platform. The site holds no keys: the web server decides who can write. We also rebuilt the course shop inside the site: product pages sit at the same addresses as in WooCommerce, payment goes through Stripe or PayPal, and the business platform handles the order, Italian e-invoicing and course access.

How it’s built

Astro, with articles in Markdown and pages as components
Python tools for snapshots, conversion and testing
Old blog comments imported and moderated in the business platform
Calculators for savings plans and income
Audio player on articles
Redirects declared in a single file, with the reason for each one
Search engines notified through IndexNow after every release
Docker and Coolify for publishing

Outcome

The final test compared 2,068 addresses: titles, descriptions, canonical, robots, Open Graph and H1 match across all articles, pages and archives. Page weight fell from around 270 KB to around 21 KB on the home page, blog and articles, and the site serves no JavaScript files. The whole site compiles in 2.8 seconds. WordPress, MailPoet and Thrive are no longer needed.