Kennedy Painting has been a trusted name in St. Louis for nearly three decades. Their reputation for quality craftsmanship built a loyal customer base and steady business growth over the years.
But their website hadn’t kept pace with their reputation. It was completely custom-coded by a third-party company. This meant their internal team couldn’t make simple updates without submitting support tickets and waiting at least 48 hours for responses.
After nearly 30 years of incremental additions and updates across multiple eras of the internet, their website had become what we call a “Frankenstein site”. It was functional, but cobbled together over time in ways that created friction, an outdated user experience, and limited internal control.
With over 400 pages (including 250 articles and 150 individual pages), strong existing SEO, and a need for modern user experience, Kennedy Painting needed a complete rebuild. They wanted something that preserved everything they’d built, while continuing to give them ownership and control over their online presence.
Why Do Legacy Websites Become Barriers to Growth?
We started this project with Kennedy Painting confronting these substantial obstacles:
- Zero internal editing capabilities: their custom-coded website required third-party support tickets for every single update, no matter how small
- A Frankenstein website architecture: built and modified across multiple internet eras, creating confusion and inefficiency in both backend management and frontend user experience
- Over 400 pages to migrate and rebuild individually: these required proper categorization and organization, and the preservation of content structure
- Strong existing SEO that couldn’t be lost during the rebuild: requiring meticulous transfer of metadata, URL structures, publication dates, and indexing signals
- Third-party hosting control: this meant they didn’t truly own their digital infrastructure, creating risk if they ever changed marketing partners
- Poor conversion rates: despite decent traffic, their outdated user interface and experience weren’t optimized for modern web behavior
For an established company with nearly three decades of history, the website had become a liability instead of an asset. They needed ownership, flexibility, and performance.
Building a Modern WordPress Foundation with Full Client Ownership
This project spanned six months and involved a complete website redesign, rebuild, and migration. We focused on giving Kennedy Painting both modern performance capabilities and complete control of the site from the backend.
We delivered:
- A Complete Design Overhaul: using static mockups for internal team feedback, keeping everything on-brand while elevating the look and feel to modern standards
- A Custom Spreadsheet Site Map: tracking all 400 pages with status updates, categorization (articles vs. regular pages), and subcategories (services, community involvement, etc.) to manage the massive migration systematically
- Custom Post Types in WordPress: we organized their 150 pages into intuitive categories—services, community, and more—so their team could quickly find and edit content without searching through hundreds of pages
- Chunked Feedback Cycles: we sent approximately 20 pages at a time to their VP of Marketing and Sales for review, keeping quality control throughout the build
- Full Hosting Ownership Transfer: we moved them off third-party hosting to their own controlled environment, eliminating the risk of extended downtime if they ever changed marketing partners
- Complete SEO Preservation: metadata, URLs, dates, and indexing signals were transferred in such a way as to maintain their hard-earned search visibility
- An Easily Editable WordPress Backend: this gave their internal team complete control to make updates, post content, and manage their site without support tickets or delays
We worked to build both a beautiful frontend experience and a functional system that empowered Kennedy Painting’s team to manage their own digital presence.
How User Experience Design Drove a 35% Conversion Increase in 15 Days
Just 15 days after launch, we compared metrics against the same timeframe before the rebuild. The results were dramatic.
The new website gave Kennedy Painting:
- Stable SEO performance with consistent impressions and clicks after Google updated the sitemap. This proved the migration preserved their search visibility.
- 58% increase in scrolling engagement, showing visitors were actually exploring content instead of bouncing.
- 35% increase in form submissions with the same traffic volume. This was purely from improved user experience and interface design.
- Complete ownership and control of their hosting environment and WordPress backend, eliminating dependency on third-party gatekeepers.
- The ability to make instant updates without support tickets or 48-hour wait times.
The conversion lift was particularly significant because it happened even while some Google Ads were temporarily paused during the transition period. When you update a website to be genuinely user-friendly, the results show up immediately in the metrics that matter most.
Legacy businesses don’t need to abandon their history to compete digitally. They need modern infrastructure that honors what they’ve built while giving them the tools to grow. Sometimes the best move isn’t starting over… It’s rebuilding the foundation correctly.
