This one’s a little personal: Lifting Times is my own magazine.
It’s an Olympic weightlifting title that’s been going since 2015, with years of genuinely good writing, a proper back catalogue, and a real readership. I didn’t build the original site, but somewhere along the line it had gone quiet and the site underneath it had quietly gone to seed. So I gave my own project the same treatment I’d give a client’s: a full rescue and rebuild, without losing a word of what made it worth reading.
The challenge
The biggest problem was the one you couldn’t see. Around 130 published articles were effectively being held hostage.
They’d been built in Thrive Architect, a page builder that stores your content in its own proprietary meta rather than in native WordPress. That’s fine, right up until the day you want to leave. Turn the plugin off and the articles don’t reflow into clean WordPress content, they simply disappear. Five years of work, chained to a single plugin.
The rest of the site had aged to match. The design was dated and didn’t behave on a phone, which is where most people actually read now. The plugin list had ballooned over the years. Author bios had gone missing and images had broken. And crucially, none of it was set up to grow or earn. It was a magazine with a real archive and nowhere to go.
Our approach
First, we got the content out of jail. We migrated all ~130 articles out of Thrive Architect into clean, native Gutenberg, verbatim. Every piece, word for word, now lives in standard WordPress content that will never again be tied to a single plugin. While we were in there, we recovered the missing author bios and fixed the broken images, so the archive came back whole rather than patched over.
Then we rebuilt it properly. Rather than reach for another page builder (see above for how that story ends), we built a bespoke, mobile-first custom WordPress theme from scratch. The design is a warm, editorial “broadsheet” feel that suits long-form writing, with self-hosted fonts for speed and privacy, and not a page builder in sight.
We were just as ruthless with the plugin list. The old site was leaning on seven legacy plugins, several of them bloated, overlapping, or long past their best. We got it down to three, all rock solid: Slim SEO for lightweight, no-nonsense SEO; FluentCRM to run the newsletter and gated guide in-house rather than handing the audience off to a third party; and FluentSMTP so the emails it sends actually reach the inbox. Fewer plugins, each genuinely earning its place, is quietly one of the best things you can do for a WordPress site’s speed, security and long-term sanity.
With the foundations solid, we set it up to actually perform:
- SEO, end to end. Slim SEO, a proper sitemap and robots.txt, structured data, and a full internal-linking pass across the whole back catalogue so the archive finally works as a connected whole. We also added an llms.txt, so the AI crawlers now reshaping search can find and cite the content cleanly.
- Cornerstone content. Authoritative technique guides, written as anchor pieces for the site to rank and grow around.
- Analytics that respect the reader. Privacy-friendly Plausible, for real insight without the cookie-banner baggage.
- Ways to earn. AdSense and Amazon affiliate monetisation wired in, plus a newsletter with a gated free guide running on FluentCRM, turning casual readers into subscribers.
Finally, a clean, careful production migration, so the switch-over happened without downtime or drama.
The results
Lifting Times is now a fast, modern, mobile-friendly magazine with its entire back catalogue preserved and, for the first time, genuinely set up to grow and earn. The content is free of the page builder that trapped it, the design does the writing justice, and the SEO, analytics and monetisation are all in place and working from day one.
The short version: a publication that was drifting is now a proper, future-proof platform I can actually build on, rather than a liability quietly ageing in the background.
Could we do this for you?
If you’ve got a WordPress site that’s aged badly, feels slow, or has your content locked inside a page builder you’ve come to resent, this is exactly the kind of work we relish (clearly, given I just put my own magazine through it). We migrate, rebuild and future-proof sites without losing what makes them yours, and we do it in plain English with no jargon and no drama.
Book a free chat and tell us what you’re working with. We’ll give you an honest view of what’s possible, and how we’d get you there.
Josh Cox
I'm Josh — I build, host and look after WordPress sites (and increasingly fast Astro / Next.js builds) for Oxfordshire businesses, from Didcot, since 2016. I also tinker with a few products of my own on the side.
