Expat Living
A platform migration gone wrong had Singapore's best-known expat lifestyle publisher sliding down the search rankings. We diagnosed the damage, cleared it, and rebuilt the site on a WordPress foundation that still powers expatliving.sg almost nine years later.
An SEO rescue after a failed migration, then a full rebuild on the Genesis Framework that Expat Living has published on daily since December 2017.
What we were solving
Expat Living is the publication Singapore's international community reads: a monthly print magazine and a daily website covering neighbourhoods, schools, homes, dining and travel, plus an events calendar, a business directory and reader competitions. In 2017 the Media Publishers Association of Singapore named it Expat Media of the Year and Lifestyle Guide of the Year.
The website was another story. It had been moved off a legacy publishing CMS onto WordPress before we arrived, and the migration had left wreckage: thousands of old-format URLs still in circulation, an abandoned subdomain in Google's index, redirect chains looping back on themselves, and expired events fed to Google through the sitemaps. Traffic had fallen through successive algorithm updates, and nobody could say why.
For a publisher, that is not a technical inconvenience. Advertisers buy homepage placements, event slots and directory listings on the strength of the audience. When search traffic slides, the product the sales team sells gets smaller every month.
How we tackled it
Diagnose before touching anything
We started in May 2017 with a full audit rather than a redesign pitch. A crawl of 10,000 URLs turned up redirect chains, broken links, improper indexing and duplicate pages, with traffic falls that lined up with Google's Panda and Penguin updates. Google was also indexing roughly 9,000 near-empty tag pages, a forgotten subdomain with over 600 URLs, and a stream of expired events and broken directory entries. The real articles were competing for Google's attention with years of junk.
The first months were remediation: junk taxonomies noindexed and removed, redirect loops untangled, sitemaps and robots rules rebuilt so only real content was offered for crawling, and the highest-value old URLs redirected to their proper homes.
Rebuild on a foundation built for daily publishing
With the site stabilised, we rebuilt it: a custom child theme on the Genesis Framework, hosted on WP Engine, launched in December 2017. The events calendar and business directory, both revenue lines previously held together by fragile plugins, were rebuilt into the theme itself.
The design decisions came from how Expat Living makes money. The homepage guarantees advertisers a set period of visibility, so story slots were built to honour those contracts. Paid key events get their own showcase. Competitions carry expiry timers. The site is shaped around an editorial team and a sales team, not a template.
Finish the cleanup the original migration skipped
A migration is only done when the old URLs are dealt with. After launch we normalised the URL structure at scale: legacy path patterns rewritten across hundreds of posts at a time, each with redirects behind it, and around 1,100 empty tag archives deleted.
What we delivered
Expat Living now publishes daily on the Chillybin build, as it has since December 2017, with the same events calendar, magazine and reader competitions running on it. Publishers replatform every few years, usually after the previous build collapses under its own content. Nearly a decade on one foundation is the result.
The editorial team also has a site where publishing a story, an event or a listing does not quietly create SEO debt. Clean URLs, controlled indexing and sitemaps that tell Google the truth are still doing their job.
What we learned
Migrations fail in the long tail. A publisher's value is not its homepage but the thousands of older articles that still pull search traffic years later. The failed migration had kept the site's appearance and lost its history. Most of our rescue work was giving Google a clean map back to it.
Publishers have an index hygiene problem most businesses never face. Every tag, expired event and lapsed listing becomes a page, and left unmanaged those pages outnumber the real ones. Curating what Google sees did more for this site than any single fix.
