A Multi-Brand Website Redesign and SEO Migration: 700+ Pages Moved Without Losing #1 Rankings
Case Study Summary
- Industry: Sports & Recreation
- Business type: Multi-brand development and management firm
- Project type: Website redesign, SEO optimization, and content migration
- Platform: WordPress + Elementor
- Service: Website Design & Development
This website redesign and SEO migration case study shows how Sports Facilities Companies, a U.S. sports facility development and management firm, kept its core #1 Google rankings and raised its Domain Rating from 51 to 56 within five months by rebuilding its 700+ page, multi-brand site around three service pillars and redirecting every legacy URL.
Background
The Sports Facilities Companies (SFC) is based in Clearwater, Florida, and has helped cities, private developers and community groups plan, build and run sports complexes across the US since 2003. By its own count it has served 3,500+ communities, has $700 million+ in active developments, and operates venues that generate $960 million+ in annual economic impact. SFC also runs a family of sub-brands, each with its own website: Community Playmaker (a magazine for cities) and the tournament and travel brands Hype Nation, Join Maximum and AwayTeam.
SFC works in three service pillars, and most clients move through them in order: Advisory (is the complex viable?), Development (design and build it) and Management (staff and run it). SFC hired Pronto for a custom WordPress website build.
Restructuring meant moving more than 700 pages, and any mistake in the migration could have cost SFC the #1 rankings its business depended on.
Years of adding pages had left the site with services listed in several places and a menu that did not reflect the three pillars SFC actually sells. The company said as much in its own request for proposals: “the user experience has become increasingly disjointed and difficult to navigate.”
Visitors could not quickly tell what the company does. As SFC’s Website Manager, put it on the first call with Pronto:
“I don’t think that people fully understand what we do by looking at our website within 30 seconds.”
The sub-brands, each on its own website, felt disconnected from the main site, and little on the site showed they all belonged to one company. The industry pages were buried under About, and the brand’s navy and blue never appeared above the fold.
BEFORE VS. AFTER
The old sportsfacilities.com homepage (left) beside the new one.
Three things shaped the work:
- Rankings worth protecting. The 700+ blog posts and about 100 project pages had earned strong Google rankings over the years, and the project pages alone drove about 60% of organic visits. SFC needed to keep that visibility through the rebuild.
- No in-house SEO lead. The person who had led SFC’s search work had just left, so the company wanted a partner who would recommend the approach and explain why.
- Done well over done fast. SFC set no hard deadline. In their own words: “We want it to be done well and that’s kind of our main focus.”
Site structure & SEO strategy before design
Before any design work, Pronto’s proposal laid out a new structure for the site. Every existing service page was sorted under one of three service pillars, Advisory, Development or Management, each with its own parent page, and industry jargon was reworded for non-expert buyers. The plan added pathways for each type of customer (local government, real estate developers, colleges and universities, sports tourism) and each type of facility (multi-sport complexes, recreation centers, aquatic centers, ice rinks and more), and brought the family of brands into the header.
That plan is why SFC chose Pronto. “Largely what led us to choose your firm was your preparedness and thoughtful presentation,” the website manager wrote after the proposal. “We’re looking for a strategic partnership with someone who understands our business model, and you demonstrated you get it.”
A navigation built around the service pillars, the pathways and the family of brands
Two homepage concepts were refined with SFC’s team over several rounds, then built into a tabbed menu that lays out the three pillars and the services beneath each, with the Industry and Facility Type pathways one click from the header. A bar across the top of the site carries the sub-brand logos, so the family of brands reads as one company. The brand’s navy and blue were brought above the fold, HubSpot forms and pop-ups were wired to every call to action, and the interactive venue map stayed on the projects page.
The Services menu on the new site: three pillars, each with its services beneath it.
The two new pathways into the site: an Industry page (Local Government & Economic Development) beside a Facility Type page (Multi-Sport Athletic Complexes).
Moving 700+ posts and 100 projects onto the new structure without losing rankings
All 700+ blog posts were migrated with their download boxes and HubSpot pop-ups preserved through 19 reusable call-to-action templates. The roughly 100 project pages could not be moved automatically, because the old pages had no consistent fields, so each project page was rebuilt by hand into a new template with a hero image, gallery, logo, facility details, team lead and related projects. Old web addresses were redirected to the new ones so rankings carried over. After three rounds of pre-launch testing and a pre-live SEO check, the site went live on April 13, 2026.
A project page rebuilt in the new template: Wintrust Sports Complex at Bedford Park.
The new sportsfacilities.com opens on the three pillars, with each pillar’s services, the Industry and Facility Type pathways and the family of brands all one click from the header. A visitor can see within seconds which phase they are in and where to go next.
All 700+ blog posts and about 100 project pages made the move, and the rankings that content had earned held. As of September 16, 2026, nine core terms rank #1 on Google in the US, six of them held from before the launch and three that moved up after it. Domain Rating, Ahrefs’ 0 to 100 measure of a site’s authority, rose from 51 to 56 between April and September 2026.
BEFORE VS. AFTER
| Keyword | Apr 1, 2026old site | Sep 16, 2026new site | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| sports facility management | 1 | 1 | Held #1 |
| sports facility construction | 1 | 1 | Held #1 |
| sports facility management company | 1 | 1 | Held #1 |
| sports facilities management | 1 | 1 | Held #1 |
| sports facility management companies | 1 | 1 | Held #1 |
| sports venue management companies | 1 | 1 | Held #1 |
| what is sports facility management | 7 | 1 | +6 |
| building a sports facility | 4 | 1 | +3 |
| managing a sports facility | 10 | 1 | +9 |
| Domain Rating | 51 | 56 | +5 |
US Google positions and Domain Rating, both from Ahrefs.
⚠️ How these numbers work
Rankings move from week to week, and Ahrefs reports estimates rather than Google’s own data. The table compares two dates, one just before launch and one five months after, for the commercial terms SFC cares about most. The goal of the migration was to keep what the old content had earned, and on those terms the site held or improved.
The Impact
SFC’s website now works the way the company sells: a municipality or developer can find their own path through Advisory, Development and Management, the family of brands reads as one organization, and there are pages for the markets SFC is growing into, such as colleges and ice rinks.
The company kept the search visibility built up over years of content while replacing the site underneath it. And because the site was built with reusable templates for pillars, services, industries, facility types, projects and blog posts, the in-house team can add pages and posts themselves.
“We went from design to production back to design and back to production several times. After many iterations, we ended in a spot that my team and I love. It was so organized and professional, I will definitely use Pronto again for large-scale website development projects.”
Outgrown your website’s structure? See how Pronto’s WordPress web design in Florida and website support help B2B companies rebuild without losing what they have earned in search.
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