Methods
Audit before touching anything
The first step of the Pànxing redesign wasn't design. It was measuring.
1 min read
First measure, then decide
Before opening any design tool, I ran a full audit of panxing.net: URL crawling, SEO health (how well the site shows up in search engines), plugin inventory (WordPress add-ons), analytics, and performance. The idea is simple: you can't rebuild a house without knowing where the load-bearing walls are.
What came out of it
The key figures: between 45,000 and 55,000 indexed URLs, 78% of traffic comes from organic search, and 69% of visits are from mobile. SEO isn't just another feature: it's the project's main asset.
The audit also made it clear that the current WordPress runs on three major plugins — Elementor for layout, Toolset for structured content, and Advanced Ads for advertising — and that any progress means working against them.
The decisions that follow
- Slugs (the piece of address that names each page) stay identical on the new platform. No massive redirects: the most conservative decision, and the most important one.
- Content is migrated, not rewritten. The new platform has to absorb what's already there, even the "About me" page (I talked about it in The "About me" page: more than a biography).
- Analytics moves to Umami (a lightweight visitor counter, on my server and cookie-free), instead of relying only on GA4 (Google's analytics).
I also saved an HTML prototype of the current site as a reference for content and URLs. I still consult it: when I'm unsure how a page or listing behaves, the answer is in there.
With that on the table, the rest was easy to prioritize: the design could change, the URLs couldn't.