Case study / JunkMD / Junk removal / San Diego County, CA
Rebuilt, migrated, and 7× faster — without losing a single ranking.
WordPress to a hand-coded modern platform in under six weeks — with the search history engineered to survive the move.
- faster server response — Google’s measurement
7×
faster server response — Google’s measurement
- daily appearances in search
+50%
daily appearances in search
- pages listed in Google
+96%
pages listed in Google
- rankings lost
0†
rankings lost
The situation
Years of search history, sitting on a site that had aged badly
JunkMD is an established junk removal company serving San Diego County. Their website had been running on WordPress for years and had accumulated something valuable and easy to overlook: search history. Hundreds of web addresses that Google had catalogued, ranked, and sent customers to.
The site itself had aged badly. It was slow, hard to update, and structurally limited in what could be added to it. A rebuild was the obvious answer. It was also the dangerous one.
The risk
The trap most rebuilds walk straight into
When a business replaces its website, the new site almost never uses the same web addresses as the old one. Page names change. Sections get reorganized. Old pages get merged or dropped.
Google does not know any of that happened. It only knows that the addresses it had catalogued have stopped working. Rankings built over years disappear in a matter of weeks, and every link pointing at the old site from directories, partners, and press leads nowhere.
This is the single most common way a website redesign quietly costs a business money. The site looks better and the phone rings less.
JunkMD hauls junk. The risk is identical if you roof, plumb, wire, or pour concrete. Any local service business sitting on years of search history walks into it the moment they rebuild.
What we did
Treat the migration as engineering, not a launch-day step
Built the new site.
A complete rebuild on a modern platform: 133 pages covering 23 core pages, 46 service pages, and 64 individual service-area pages — each with local detail rather than a swapped-out city name. Four design directions were explored before landing on the final look.
Engineered the migration before touching the domain.
Before the switchover, every address on the old WordPress site was inventoried — 204 in total — by crawling the site and cross-checking against the sitemap the old system published for itself. Each one was then classified: does an equivalent page exist on the new site, does it need to point somewhere related, or is it genuinely retired?
That produced 135 forwarding rules, each one verified to land on a page that actually exists. Anyone — or any search engine — arriving at an old address is delivered to the right new page automatically, and the search history transfers with them.
Launched, then verified.
The domain switched over on June 30 and the new sitemap was submitted to Google the same day. In the weeks after, we ran a full audit of the migration rather than assuming it worked: every forwarding rule tested against a live page, every sitemap entry confirmed reachable, every old address confirmed to resolve. Zero broken, zero orphaned.
Results
Measured by Google, on the same scale, before and after
All post-launch figures cover July 1 onward — the point at which Adimize became solely responsible for the site. Figures for the old site come from the same Google Search Console property, which was already monitoring the domain before the switchover.
| Measured by Google | Old site | New site | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average server response time | 795 ms | 116 ms | −85% |
| Pages listed in Google | 68 | 133 | +96% |
| Daily appearances in search | 1,289 | 1,940 | +50% |
| Old addresses lost in migration | — | 0 | — |
Independent testing puts the new site at 82 out of 100 for speed on a mid-range Android phone over a slow mobile connection (Google PageSpeed Insights, August 8, 2026), and 100 out of 100 for search optimization. In competitive local search, JunkMD now holds first-page positions for terms including “junk removal san diego.”†
V1.1 ships at the 90-day mark — late September — with the full search-performance trend from the same GSC property.
Why it matters
The speed number is a revenue number
Google’s crawler records how long a site takes to respond every time it visits. Because it was already monitoring the domain before the switchover, it measured both sites on the same scale: 795 milliseconds before, 116 after. Roughly seven times faster — Google’s measurement, not ours.
The reason is a change in how the site is assembled. The old site built every page on demand — a visitor taps a link, the server wakes up, queries a database, runs a stack of plugins, assembles the page, and only then sends it. Every visitor, every time. The new site is built in advance. All 133 pages were assembled once, ahead of time, and copies sit on servers distributed across the country. A visitor in San Diego is handed one from nearby. Nothing is built while they wait.
This matters commercially before it matters technically. Someone standing in a cluttered garage on their phone is not waiting five seconds for a page to appear. They tap back and try the next result. Speed is the difference between a lead reaching the quote form and a lead reaching a competitor.
AI search
Built for AI search, not just Google
A growing share of customers now ask AI tools — AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity — rather than scanning a list of links. Those tools answer by pulling from web pages and citing them, and they draw from the same pool of catalogued pages that traditional search does. A page that is not listed cannot be cited at all.
Three things carry over directly. Doubling the pages Google lists doubles the content eligible to appear in an AI answer. Standardizing each page to one definitive address means these systems can attribute an answer cleanly rather than splitting it across duplicates. And publishing business facts in a structured, machine-readable format — service areas, what is and is not accepted, how pricing works — gives retrieval systems something concrete to extract.
Worth stating plainly: AI search visibility cannot yet be measured the way rankings can. No dashboard reports how often a business is cited by ChatGPT. What can be said is that both are governed by the same fundamentals, and that this site is now materially stronger on every one of them.
That groundwork is the build. AI-Search SEO is the ongoing half — the monthly work of staying the answer these systems retrieve.
Timeline
Under six weeks, gate by gate
| Phase | Period | Work |
|---|---|---|
| Design & build | → late May | Full rebuild on a modern platform; four design directions explored. |
| Migration engineering | early–late June | 204 legacy addresses inventoried, classified, and mapped to 135 verified forwarding rules. |
| Launch | June 30 | Domain switched over; new sitemap submitted to Google the same day. |
| Verification & tuning | July–August | Full migration audit, indexing corrections, pricing rollout, error-handling improvements. |
The method
No trick. A repeatable process.
The results above come from treating the migration as an engineering problem with a verifiable answer, rather than a step to get through on launch day. The process is the same regardless of what your trucks haul:
- Capture the baseline — Search performance, indexing, crawl speed — before touching anything. Without a before, there is no after.
- Inventory everything — Every existing address, from two independent sources: a crawl and the site’s own sitemap. Either alone misses pages.
- Map and verify — Each forwarding rule confirmed against a page that actually exists — not assumed.
- Audit after launch — Test the live site rather than trusting the deployment.
- Measure on a schedule — Same metrics against the same baseline every time — including the ones still open.
Sitting on an old site you’re afraid to touch?
Same process, your domain. The search history you’ve built survives the move — inventoried, mapped, verified, and audited after launch.
Or just reply to any email from us. No calls. No Loom videos. Email works.
Figures sourced from Google Search Console (indexing, crawl statistics, search performance) and Google PageSpeed Insights. Speed testing reflects laboratory conditions on a simulated mid-range device and slow mobile connection.
† Basis: matched-query position set from the same Google Search Console property, pre/post June 30 — verification pending.
Adimize builds and maintains websites for local service businesses. · August 2026