IrishCars.ie: rebuilding a motoring blog
An Irish car advice site with years of content, stuck on a slow WordPress and Elementor install that had been quietly compromised. I rebuilt it from the ground up as a fast, secure static site, without losing a single post or old link.
Content site rebuild and migration
Next.js static export on Netlify
Migration, design, build, SEO, ads and DNS move
August 2026
What was wanted.
The site had good content and some real rankings, but the platform underneath was working against it. Pages were heavy with oversized images, and the WordPress install had picked up an obfuscated third-party script that loaded code from an outside domain.
- Get off the compromised install, cleanly, with nothing malicious carried across.
- Keep everything that was working: every post, every image, and every old URL Google already knew about.
- Make it fast, on phones especially, where most car searches happen.
- Earn from ads properly, without them slowing the page or breaking the layout.
- Grow search traffic by fixing the SEO basics and filling obvious content gaps.
What got built.
All 44 posts and the site pages pulled out of WordPress, cleaned and rebuilt as plain content, with the injected script stripped out
A static site with no database, plugins or admin login to attack, plus strict security headers
Images converted to WebP and resized: 41 MB down to 5.6 MB across the site
301 redirects for old WordPress URLs and sitemaps, so existing rankings and backlinks carried over
A new editorial design: serif headlines, clear categories, and a featured story on the homepage
Google AdSense placed so ads only load once their slot has a real size, scaled to the length of each article
SEO fixes: one H1 per page, shorter titles on 16 posts, article schema, 18 posts refreshed for 2026, internal links up from 20 to 83
New content for gaps in the market: a motor tax guide for a search with around 11,000 monthly searches and almost no competition, and an NCT centre directory
Screens from the live site.
The rebuild, in numbers.
Image weight, 41 MB down to 5.6 MB
More internal links, 20 up to 83
Articles live today, all migrated or written new
Plugins, databases or admin logins to hack
Saunas in Ireland: a sauna directory for the whole island
Stuck on an old WordPress site? See website redesign.
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