Case study
Anderson Dock & Lift, rebuilt and moved
Anderson Dock & Lift Co., a dock, boat lift and seawall contractor in Bradenton, Florida, had a website built and hosted by a managed vendor. The site could not be edited by the owner, would not survive closing the account, and had page addresses that changed when a page was renamed. We rebuilt it by hand on hosting bought in the owner's name and cut the domain over on a Sunday evening in August 2026, without touching his email. The new site is at andersondockandlift.com.
What we found
The owner, Pete Anderson, had been paying a vendor for years and could not change a phone number on his own site. The vendor's platform generated city pages automatically, thousands of blocks of placeholder text that had never been filled in, and no way to set a page title or a redirect.
The parts that mattered were his: the domain, registered in his own account years earlier, and his email, which ran on Microsoft 365 in the same DNS zone as the site. The vendor was reached by records inside that zone, not by nameservers, which meant the site could be repointed without the vendor's cooperation. That single fact decided the shape of the job.
His Google reviews were also his, attached to a Business Profile he controlled.
What we did
Secured the assets first. Confirmed the domain registrar account was in his name, confirmed the mail records, and wrote both down before anything else happened. Locked the domain against transfer once the cutover was done.
Rebuilt on a preview address. The new site went up on a temporary address, marked not to be indexed, so he could read every page before it was live. WordPress, on hosting he bought with his own card, in his own account.
Wrote it by hand. Every service page from the trade itself: the permitting authority, the county, the waterways he actually works, the lifts he actually installs. No template copy. Name, address, and phone defined once and written into every page and every block of structured data, so they can never disagree.
Mapped every old address. We crawled the old site before it went dark and wrote a redirect for each address that had ever been indexed.
Tested the forms on the preview, then again on the live domain after cutover.
Cut over on a Sunday evening. Changed the records that point at the site. Left the mail records alone. Checked mail before and after. Verified the redirects live, requested indexing in Search Console.
Cleaned the profile and listings. One address of record, everywhere. Old addresses retired from the directories that still carried them.
What the owner holds now
The domain, the hosting account, the site admin, Search Console, Analytics, and the Business Profile. All in his name. If he stopped working with us tomorrow, nothing would need to be handed back.
What the numbers say
Nothing yet, on purpose. The site went live in August 2026, and a search reading taken a few weeks after a migration measures the migration, not the site. The first honest reading comes after ninety days, and it will be published here, whatever it shows.
What we would tell another owner on a managed platform
Check your nameservers before you do anything. If they point at the vendor, the move is harder and you need the vendor's cooperation. If they point at your registrar, you can leave when you like. Ten minutes with a DNS lookup tool answers it, and the GEO Snapshot records it for you.