Case Study — ArtsEtc Barbados
Rescuing 20 years of Barbadian literary history
ArtsEtc has documented Barbadian writing, art, and culture since 2003. When its ageing Drupal 7 platform reached end of the road, most of that archive was effectively invisible — dates lost, bylines stripped, whole sections unreachable. We replatformed the publication onto headless WordPress and brought the archive back.
663
Legacy links preserved with verified redirects
447
Posts in the final catalogue — every one reachable
~125
Contributors re-credited across 290 restored bylines
~490
Sitemap URLs, up from about 100 — the full catalogue visible to search
The challenge
Twenty years of publishing is a serious archive: reviews, comics, past issues, and the bylines of roughly 125 contributors. By 2026, almost none of it was usable.
The site had inherited a lossy migration years earlier. 77% of posts carried a single, identical import date instead of their real publication dates — two decades of history flattened into one day. Author credits had been stripped from hundreds of articles. Entire sections — Reviews, Comics, Past Issues — had dropped out of the site's navigation. Of 471 posts in the database, around 343 could not be reached from the live site at all, and search engines could see barely a fifth of the catalogue.
The brief had two halves that pulled in opposite directions: modernise the platform without disrupting the editors, and recover the archive without rewriting history.
The approach
Content archaeology first
Before touching the design, we wrote a suite of 16 re-runnable recovery scripts that worked through the database post by post: restoring real publication dates from 2003 to 2025, reattaching 290 bylines across roughly 125 contributors, removing 48 duplicate posts, and recovering the Reviews, Comics, and Past Issues sections. Because every step was scripted and repeatable, the rescue could be audited, re-run, and handed over — not locked in one person's head.
A new platform that feels familiar
We replatformed from Drupal 7 to headless WordPress: the editorial team keeps the WordPress dashboard they already know, while readers get a fast, modern front end. The homepage is organised around “The Map” — an image-accordion navigation across the publication's seven departments — and the hero video was compressed from 40.5MB to under 4MB, roughly 90% lighter.
Twenty years of links, preserved
A publication this old is cited everywhere — bibliographies, syllabi, blogs, social media. We mapped and verified 663 permanent redirects from legacy URLs to their new homes, so two decades of inbound links keep working. The sitemap grew from around 100 URLs to around 490: the full catalogue, visible to search engines for the first time in years.
The launch that waited
Our own pre-launch audit returned a NO-GO: nine blocking issues we were not willing to ship with. So launch waited until every one was fixed. When the site did go live, the DNS cutover happened with zero downtime — and the full set of recovery scripts was handed over with it.
The results
- —All 447 posts in the final catalogue are reachable — previously around 343 of 471 were not.
- —Real publication dates restored across the archive, replacing the single import date that 77% of posts carried.
- —290 bylines re-credited to roughly 125 contributors.
- —663 verified permanent redirects preserve 20 years of inbound links.
- —Search visibility went from roughly a fifth of the catalogue to all of it (~100 to ~490 sitemap URLs).
- —Editors kept their WordPress workflow; the publication kept its history.
“This is really a gorgeous site: warm, bold, inviting… clear and easy to navigate.”
Have an archive worth saving?
Replatforms do not have to mean starting over. Book a free consultation and we will tell you honestly what can be rescued.
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