Project Overview
Tristar came to us with a site another developer had built up over years: 177 blog posts, 40 service pages across four service types, 20 city pages, and 36 pieces of press coverage.
The content was strong. The structure was not. Headings jumped levels, related content never linked to itself, schema was thin, and parts of the layout were held together by fragile page-builder workarounds.
We took over the codebase, learned how the site actually rendered, and rebuilt the moving parts as proper theme code, followed by a site-wide SEO cleanup.
Key Challenges
- Inheriting another developer's codebase and conventions
- 300+ published pages that could not simply be rebuilt from scratch
- Broken heading hierarchy across hundreds of posts
- Related content that never linked to itself
- Page-builder workarounds that crashed the editor
Takeovers are diagnosis-first work by nature. Before changing anything we mapped every post type, template, and loop on the site, so each fix was made once, in the right place.
The Solution
We put the theme under version control, then replaced the fragile parts with purpose-built theme widgets: featured services the owner curates, related articles, related services, and per-archive icons that the page builder alone could not do reliably.
Then came the content cleanup: heading levels repaired in batches across hundreds of posts, site-wide schema, a proper brand share image, and internal links connecting services, cities, and articles.
- Custom Theme Widgets
Native Elementor widgets built into the child theme: a featured-services loop the owner curates by flag and order, related-article and related-service loops driven by category maps, and archive icons that replaced a workaround that crashed the editor.
- Content Model
Four service types, city pages, news, and reviews now each have a defined template, loop, and place in the structure, so new content lands in the right spot automatically.
- SEO Cleanup
Heading levels fixed in batches across the blog, Rank Math audit findings worked through, and pagination and accessibility issues repaired and verified in the rendered pages.
- Internal Linking
A programmatic internal-linking pass connects articles to the services they support, verified link by link in the rendered HTML.
- Version Control and Deployability
The child theme now lives in git with an update pipeline, so changes ship deliberately instead of being edited live on the server.
The Result
The site kept everything that made it valuable, years of content and press coverage, and gained the structure it was missing.
The owner curates featured services by flipping a flag. Related content cross-links itself. New posts inherit the correct template, schema, and linking with no manual work.
Fuentes Tech continues to maintain and extend the site as their standing web and SEO partner.