Use-case: Alchemy of the Verb - from WordPress to Laravel, without losing anything along the way

The brief: moving away from WordPress without breaking what works

When Sylvie, founder of Alchimie du Verbe, contacted us, the observation was simple. Her WordPress site had reached its limits: plugins piled up for every need, anxiety-inducing updates, a sprawling back-office, and a slowness that began to weigh on both her visitors' experience and her own.

The challenge was not to "make a pretty site." It was twofold:

• to fully preserve the content, identity, and editorial quality of the existing site;

• to transition to a technical base that is controlled, sustainable, and tailored for her use - not for a million WordPress sites.

The mission entrusted to Mermio: migrate the site to a custom Laravel stack, with a back-office specifically designed for how Sylvie works on a daily basis.

Who is Alchimie du Verbe

Alchimie du Verbe is a training center for professional and creative writing based in Pully, in French-speaking Switzerland. Sylvie offers training sessions, workshops, coaching, and an editorial blog - focusing on language, precision, and the joy of writing well.

It is a unique client: her profession revolves around words. Every comma on the site matters. Every title hierarchy tells a story. Every page must reflect a certain relationship with the language. So, there was no room for approximation in the integration.

The Mermio approach: listen first, code later

In this type of project, the classic mistake is to arrive with a ready-made technical framework and force the client into it. We did the opposite: we spent time understanding how Sylvie used her site on a daily basis - what she liked, what held her back, what she avoided for fear of "breaking something".

From there, four areas structured the migration.

1. A pixel-perfect integration, faithful to the existing

The design of the WordPress site had been carefully thought out. Rather than starting from scratch, we chose a pixel-perfect integration: to replicate, screen for screen, the original visual identity - typography, spacing, responsive behaviors - but on a clean technical foundation. Sylvie did not have to "relearn" her own site. Neither did her visitors.

Avant Après

2. A back-office designed for her, not for everyone

This is where the transition to Laravel makes all the difference. Instead of a generic editor with forty options that she only used three of, we built a custom back-office with Filament - which only offers her what she actually needs:

• management of training sessions and workshops;

• publishing blog articles with a clear editorial structure;

• centralized FAQ, legal pages, editable llms.txt and robots.txt files;

• no plugins to update, no hidden panels, no orphan fields.

Result: daily management is radically simplified. What used to take ten clicks and a bit of anxiety now takes two, without any anxiety.

Avant Après

3. Complete recovery of existing SEO

A poorly prepared migration can result in the loss of months - even years - of SEO. Therefore, we approached the transition methodically:

• complete mapping of WordPress URLs and an exhaustive 301 redirect plan;

• preservation and cleaning of performing meta titles and meta descriptions;

• recovery of the structure of semantic tags (Hn, structured data);

• post-migration verification via Search Console and technical audits.

Stated objective: to make the switch invisible to Google.

4. GEO optimization: being readable by AIs

Beyond classic SEO, we took advantage of the migration to prepare the site for generative search (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude…). This is known as GEO - Generative Engine Optimization. Specifically:

• rigorous Schema.org structured data for each type of content (trainings, articles, FAQs, organization);

• llms.txt and llms-full.txt files properly exposing the center's offerings to AI engines;

• structured content to answer questions, not just to match keywords;

• editorial hierarchy readable by both machines and humans.

When a future student asks an AI, "where to learn creative writing in French-speaking Switzerland?", the name of Alchimie du Verbe should come up - and with the right information.

What the migration changed concretely

• Performance: faster pages, fewer requests, less weight - without a plugin to "compress" what was heavy to begin with.
  

  ALCHIMIE DU VERBE

  Dernier audit le 7 May 2026. 41 pages analysées

  • 90
    Performance
  • 95
    Accessibility
  • 100
    Best practices
  • 100
    SEO

  Average scores obtained on https://pagespeed.web.dev/

• Maintenance: no more plugins to update blindly, no more risk of an outdated extension breaking the site.

• Editorial peace: Sylvie publishes without fear of "breaking something". The back-office was designed so that there is, in fact, nothing to break.

• Sustainability: Laravel is a maintained, documented, durable framework. The site is now scalable, not disposable.

What we take away from this collaboration

Migrating a WordPress site to a custom solution is not an act of technical force. It is, first and foremost, an exercise in listening. Understanding how the client works. Understanding what she does not want to lose. Understanding what in the old site deserved to be preserved as is - and what deserved, finally, to be simplified.

With Sylvie, dialogue was the raw material of the project as much as the code. And that is probably why the transition went smoothly: for her, for her visitors, and for her SEO.

A good custom site does not add complexity - it removes it. The rest is listening, and a bit of technical discipline.

Do you have a WordPress site to evolve?

If you recognize the situation - a WordPress that has reached its limits, plugins piling up, management becoming laborious, SEO that must not be broken - this is exactly the type of project Mermio excels at.

Migration from WordPress to Laravel, custom back-office designed for your profession, clean SEO recovery, GEO preparation for AI engines. No clean slate. No drama.

Let's talk about it →