Moving a 500-Page Physio Website Without Losing a Thing

When a physio practice with a large website changes hosts, the risk is not that the new server is slow. It is that something small and important quietly breaks: a page that used to rank, an old address that now shows an error, an email setting, a form that stops reaching the clinic. This is how we handled that move for Khy Physio, a Melbourne practice that brings physiotherapy to people's homes, and what we changed once the site was settled.

Our work started in August 2026. Everything below was checked on the live site, and where a figure is a before-and-after comparison, the before is our own measurement from the start of the work.

The starting point

Khy Physio sends physiotherapists to people at home, in aged care and at work across Melbourne and Geelong, and it works with funding schemes including NDIS, DVA, Support at Home, TAC and WorkCover. Its website is a large WordPress build with a custom theme, hundreds of local suburb pages and an AI chat assistant. When we picked it up:

• The site had more than 500 pages and needed to move to new hosting without losing content, email or search standing.
• 34 older addresses returned a 404 error.
• The page cache did nothing on the new server, and pages were being sent uncompressed.
• Referrals came in through a form embedded from a third-party booking system.
• Conversion figures included newsletter sign-ups made by bots.

Moving the site without losing anything

We moved the site, its theme and its chat assistant to our hosting. Rather than clicking around to see whether pages looked right, we compared the old and new databases directly. Nothing was missing.

The practice's email runs on Microsoft 365, and a host move is where email tends to break without anyone noticing. We removed duplicate SPF and DMARC records that were competing with each other, added DKIM signing and restored the autodiscover records that let Outlook find its settings, so mail kept flowing through the move.

Fixing dead ends and slow pages

We redirected the 34 broken addresses to the pages that replaced them, then re-checked 285 addresses from before the site's last rebuild and found none broken. On 15 September 2026, every one of the 519 addresses in the sitemap loaded.

The page cache was replaced with one that works on the new server, and compression was switched on. The homepage HTML now travels as about 20 KB instead of 93 KB. Later we shrank the homepage hero video from 2.24 MB to 583 KB, hosted the site's fonts ourselves and set sensible caching for images, scripts and styles, which previously had no cache instructions at all. On mobile, the load time for the main content of one of the practice's longer cost articles fell from 12.4 seconds to 5.3 seconds in a Lighthouse test. The homepage improved too, but it still has work left, and we would rather say so.

Checking the data before changing anything

Soon after the move there was a concern that search traffic had dropped, and a plan to hide the local suburb pages from Google in response. Before anything changed, we looked at Search Console and Google Analytics together. There was no drop. The suburb pages were earning a real share of the site's clicks, so they stayed, and we exported seventeen months of search history so the next question can be answered the same way. We then rewrote the titles and descriptions of 13 of those suburb pages.

The data did show one genuine problem. Four old posts and one page were competing with the homepage for the same Melbourne searches. We retired them and redirected them to the homepage, which also took the sitemap from 519 addresses down to 512 once a thank-you page and the category archives were kept out of it.

Giving search engines accurate details

The practice's structured data was thin. We set the business type to physiotherapy and added its service area and phone number. The opening hours had been published as Monday to Sunday, 9 to 5, which was not right. They now match the practice's own record. Individual service pages, which had no structured data at all, now have it.

Health content also goes out of date. Funding rules changed in 2025: Support at Home replaced Home Care Packages on 1 November 2025, and the GP chronic condition management plan replaced the old GPMP and TCA arrangements on 1 July 2025. We checked those against the government sources and corrected older articles and the chat assistant's knowledge base that still described the previous rules.

Conversion tracking the practice can trust

Four actions are now measured as conversions: phone taps, email clicks, inquiries and use of the booking form. They are marked as key events in Google Analytics and reported to Google Ads with enhanced conversions, and we tested them in a real browser rather than assuming the tags fired. The bot sign-ups no longer count as leads. A tracking setup that overstates results is worse than none, because budgets get set by it.

Referrals straight into the practice software

The referral form is now a native form on the page. It is styled like the rest of the site, supports file uploads, and sends referrals and chat inquiries directly into the clinic's practice software.

What we have not claimed

Most of the site's search growth happened before our first work on it in August 2026, so we are not presenting rankings or traffic as our result. We have also left out anything about patients, staff or fees.

If you run a clinic or another service business and are planning a move, a rebuild or a tidy-up, the lesson from this project is simple: compare before and after with real data, redirect everything, and keep your measurement honest. You can see the practice's current site at Khy Physio, and a longer write-up with screenshots is in the Khy Physio case study from our sister agency. If you would like a second pair of eyes on your own site, get in touch.