Teplokhimmontazh 3.0: from WordPress to ProcessWire

Teplokhimmontazh is a holding that develops and produces refractory materials and builds industrial facilities. We have built several versions of the holding’s website. It is a large site — product offers, projects, partners, vacancies, videos, news — and several staff members keep it up to date.

The previous version of the site ran on WordPress, and by the time of the move that had become a problem. The design and layout could be changed only within narrow limits. A complex data structure — products, solutions, projects, facilities, partners — was hard to organise. The site was very slow, and technical support was a constant source of trouble.

The first thing we did was move the content. At the start of the project we had no access to the old site’s sources, so we downloaded the whole site — every page and image in both languages — and took that copy apart into ProcessWire pages and fields with our own migration tools.

The result was checked automatically: a Playwright script opened the project lists on the old and the new site and compared them by title and image. The old WordPress addresses did not vanish either: about 180 of them in each language lead to the new pages through 301 redirects.

A visitor sees an ordinary corporate site; the real complexity of the project is hidden from them. Under the hood is a structure in which most entities are linked to each other. A project refers to the holding company, the client, a partner, the facility, its city, solutions, services, products, plant units and videos. Solutions and services in turn refer to products, plant units and videos.

The links work both ways. Mark a solution, a service, a plant unit, a partner or a client on a project, and the project shows up on their pages by itself. Every fact is entered once, so managing the content has become far easier than it was in the WordPress days.

374 pages in one structure: 174 offers, 77 projects, 28 partners, 18 vacancies and 17 videos. Speed without a fight: the home page weighs 551 KB and holds PageSpeed 90 on mobile — with full-screen photographs of production.