Rebuilding a decade-old theatre site for the AI search era
Seminole Theatre ran the same Joomla site for ten years. We moved it to WordPress and it now earns 30% more search clicks from half as many impressions.
See the live site →Seminole Theatre is a historic performing arts venue in Homestead, Florida, operated by Oak View Group. Released Solutions built its original website in 2015 and has maintained it ever since.
By 2026 that site had become a liability rather than an asset. Nothing had broken. The definition of working had changed — the content management system had reached end of life, the theatre had cycled through several ticketing platforms, mobile had become the majority of its audience, and search had quietly grown three new acronyms.
We rebuilt it in WordPress in July 2026, preserving a decade of programming and every inbound link.
TheChallenge
The site launched on Joomla in September 2015. Its oldest surviving article is dated 4 September 2015, and the first show on its calendar played 13 January 2016. Over the following ten years, six things drifted apart at once.
The CMS. Joomla 3 reached end of life, its extensions stopped being maintained, and the theme crashed outright on PHP 8.4.
The ticket vendors. The theatre changed ticketing platforms several times and each one left fossils behind, including abandoned markup in the page source and hand-pasted ticket links in 55 event descriptions.
Devices. A 2015 responsive layout is not a 2026 mobile experience. Mobile now accounts for 80% of the theatre's search clicks.
Search. Satisfying SEO alone became satisfying SEO, AEO, SXO and GEO.
The content. 1,132 articles, 804 events and 1,571 images accumulated, along with Joomla shortcode tags, hidden metadata blocks and orphaned embeds.
The infrastructure. A calendar-fuzzing botnet hammering legacy URLs was exhausting the host's database connection cap and taking the site down.
TheAnalysis
Before writing any code we audited what ten years had actually produced, and decided what deserved to be carried forward.
Auditing ten years of drift
We inventoried every article, event, image and menu path in the Joomla database, then traced which URLs Google still crawled. That audit produced the redirect map and revealed the dead URL patterns that were absorbing crawl budget and returning errors.
Choosing the platform
The client's most frequent need is to change something in ninety seconds without calling us. A headless or SaaS rebuild would have put a developer between the theatre and its own content. WordPress has the largest pool of trained editors and maintained plugins of any CMS, so box office staff can publish a show the morning it goes on sale.
Rethinking the plugin strategy
We use trusted, mostly free plugins for the commodity layer, then build the exact custom layer on top with AI. Every dollar not spent on premium plugin licensing is a dollar spent on capability the theatre actually owns.
TheSolution
Migrating a decade of content
We rejected browser-based import plugins as unreliable at this scale. The Joomla database was loaded alongside WordPress and every record moved by a mapped, scripted, server-side migration.
Building the custom layer
The live site runs 25 active plugins. Seventeen are third-party and nearly all free. Eight are custom plugins written for this site, alongside ten custom must-use plugins.
Ten years of ticketing churn, solved once. The button renders from a single URL field, so changing vendors changes nothing else on the site.
A four-night run was flooding the homepage with four identical cards. One card now represents the run while the underlying events stay intact for search.
An in-house ad server with scheduling and per-slide impression, click and clickthrough tracking, replacing a paid plugin with roughly 250 lines.
Live reviews on the site, automatic Google event posts when staff tick one box, and a Monday morning digest.
Rewrites the calendar's structured data to fill every field Google requires, and declares 126 pages as the watch page for their embedded video.
Satisfying SEO, AEO, SXO and GEO
Four acronyms, four concrete artifacts. None of them is a setting you switch on.
SEO. 1,164 redirects, sitemap hygiene, and 410 Gone responses for the dead URL patterns Google refused to stop crawling.
AEO. The information page was rebuilt as 16 questions with FAQ schema, written to be quotable by an AI assistant. The visible answer and the schema answer match exactly.
SXO. An accessible accordion with a working no-JavaScript fallback, a single clean heading structure, WebP imagery and mobile-first layout. The page has to be good after the click.
GEO. Venue schema carrying address, coordinates and social profiles, so an assistant can state the date, price, venue and ticket link correctly.
TheResults
The site now appears for half as many searches and earns 30% more clicks from them.
Roughly a thousand junk legacy URLs were deliberately removed from the index. The site stopped competing for searches it could never win, and won more of the ones that matter.
year over year
1.86% to 5.52%
gained in Google
ChatGPT in 12 months
Only organic search figures are claimed here. Total traffic and revenue were excluded: a paid social campaign ran across the same period, and revenue follows what shows are on sale rather than what platform is running.
“The new website looks amazing. Everything is coming together beautifully. Great job on the new website.”
Is your site still built for the search of ten years ago?
We rebuild established sites without losing what they have already earned.
