Forzabuilt — WordPress to Astro B2B Catalog Migration
How I rebuilt a 200+ SKU industrial adhesives catalog on Astro with layered redirects, structured data, and 99% Lighthouse — driving 28 qualified inbound leads in four months.
Senior full-stack engineer — platform architecture, migration, and SEO-critical release controls
99%
Lighthouse desktop
28
Qualified inbound (4 mo)
200+
SKU catalog migrated
99%
Technical SEO health
Forzabuilt is a B2B industrial adhesives manufacturer serving Florida and the Southeast construction market. When they rebranded and outgrew WordPress, they needed a full platform transition — not a reskin — without the indexing collapse that kills most B2B migrations.
The problem
The legacy site carried three risks at once:
- Performance debt — media-heavy product pages with poor Core Web Vitals on a catalog buyers actually search by specification.
- URL sprawl — years of WordPress paths that procurement teams had bookmarked, linked, and indexed.
- Wrong information architecture — products organized for marketing, not how adhesive buyers search (application, substrate, compliance).
A failed migration would mean lost organic equity right when the rebrand needed inbound to work.
My role
I owned front-end architecture and the migration program end to end: Astro with React islands, canonical route design, redirect continuity, structured data, and release validation before cutover.
What I built
Migration without the indexing cliff
B2B catalog migrations fail when redirect coverage is an afterthought. I treated URL continuity as a first-class deliverable:
- Canonical route structure replacing legacy WordPress patterns across 200+ product pages.
- Layered redirect rules — middleware plus edge configuration — preserving equity on high-traffic legacy paths.
- Pre-launch crawl/index validation so we could ship the rebrand and platform change in one transition.
B2B-native catalog architecture
Industrial buyers do not browse hero banners. I restructured IA around procurement intent:
- Category and product pages organized by application, substrate, and specification.
- Product and FAQ schema across the catalog for rich results.
- Downloadable spec paths and comparison-friendly layouts for technical buyers.
Production-grade performance
On a media-heavy catalog, I sustained 99% Lighthouse desktop through:
- Selective React hydration (islands) instead of shipping a full SPA.
- Image optimization and edge delivery on Vercel.
- Code splitting so category pages stay fast under real catalog weight.
Outcomes
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Lighthouse desktop | 99% sustained |
| Technical SEO health | 99% post-remediation |
| Qualified inbound | 28 MQL submissions (26 unique contacts) in first four months |
| Baseline | Effectively zero qualified web inbound pre-rebuild |
Leadership credited the rebuild with the best single website contact in company history — the kind of inbound that validates both the technical migration and the procurement-focused IA.
What this demonstrates
- Shipping a full platform transition on a 200+ SKU catalog without the visibility loss common in B2B rebuilds.
- Layered redirect strategy when URL patterns change materially.
- SEO and engineering decisions made as one program — not SEO bolted on after launch.
“Literally the best single website contact in the history of the company.”
Live system
forzabuilt.com ↗