A new site engine in one day, with every page proven identical

We rebuilt our own website on a new engine and put it live in a single working day. Every URL, every link and every search tag stayed exactly where it was, email kept working throughout, and the site came out of it able to do something the old one never could: run a sales funnel.

EVDevs was its own client here, so we can show the whole job.

The starting point

evdevs.com was a bilingual static site, generated by a Python script and uploaded to shared hosting by hand. It had a landing page, a Services hub, an offer page for funded startups, a portfolio with case studies, a categorized blog with 36 posts in each language, and public sales documents.

It worked, but every edit had to be uploaded before anyone could click through it. Reviewing a change was slow, so changes waited. And a funnel needs things a static generator does badly: a qualifying form with source tracking, a thank-you page that records the conversion, booking, a CRM hand-off and lead magnets.

The rebuild: proven, not eyeballed

We moved the site to Astro. Content moved to Markdown and JSON with a validated schema, so titles, descriptions, categories and dates are checked on every build. A broken post now fails the build instead of reaching a reader. The full site builds in about 1.3 seconds.

The old site stayed live and untouched until the new build reached parity, and parity was measured, not judged by eye. A script compared every page of the old and new builds on four things:

• The URL, so no page and no inbound link is lost.
• The visible text, so nothing was dropped or changed in the move.
• Every link, so navigation and internal linking stay intact.
• The head tags (canonical, hreflang and meta), which search engines read to understand each page.

All 111 URLs and the sitemap matched. That is what makes a migration safe for search: Google sees the same site at the same addresses, just served faster to change. We use the same approach on client redesigns, described in Redesign without losing what ranks.

The comparison also caught a defect in the old site: titles containing a colon were displayed with literal quote marks. The rebuild fixed it. A careful migration tends to do that; it is the first time anyone checks every page at once.

The switch: move the website, leave the email alone

The new site went to Vercel, running first at a private test address while the live site kept serving visitors. The domain's DNS is managed in Cloudflare, and the switch was deliberately narrow:

• Only the website records for the bare domain and www moved to Vercel; www now redirects to the bare domain.
• Email, webmail and the hosting control panel stayed on the existing host. Their hostnames were converted to direct records before the switch, so they could not follow the website by accident.
• The previous site is still in place. Going back means restoring two DNS records.

After the switch we checked the result, not the dashboard: every page in the sitemap, 115 by then, loads over HTTPS from Vercel; www and plain http redirect to the secure bare domain; webmail and the control panel still have valid certificates; and a test lead sent from the live site was accepted and sent out.

Why one day was possible

Speed came from the method, not from shortcuts. We exported all content from the old generator with a script instead of retyping it, built the page types as components, and let an automated comparison do the checking a person cannot do across 111 pages. Engineers decided what to compare, what counted as a match and when to switch; the machine did the repetition. That is what we mean by human expertise, machine velocity.

If your site needs a new foundation but cannot afford to lose its URLs, its rankings or a day of email, this is the shape of the work: rebuild alongside, prove parity page by page, then move only what has to move.