The challenge
A safari and gorilla-trekking operator sells $4,500-and-up trips to US travelers, so its site is the storefront for a high-trust purchase. We found it had been compromised: a pirated WordPress theme with a backdoor had injected 252 spam backlinks, on top of failing Core Web Vitals.
What we did
- Rebuilt on Astro, Vercel, and Keystatic, migrating 239 tours and 200 posts into clean content collections.
- Mapped 483 redirects so years of SEO equity carried over.
- Closed the vulnerability for good: a static site has no database, plugins, or admin login to exploit.
- Run their paid search too: lower-funnel, high-intent US search that hit a 10.3% CTR and ~40% impression share, feeding the fast new site.
Results
A slow, hacked WordPress install became a fast static site with nothing to attack. The full catalog moved across with every URL redirected, protecting rankings instead of resetting them, and the client’s own team can now run it from the browser.