Complex subscription app and website.
Pushing the bounds of WordPress with members, licenses and integrations
Why did Literature and Latte need to move to WordPress?
Literature and Latte make Scrivener – one of the most widely used writing applications in the world. Their website carries 1,300 pages of content and serves a global audience every day. The platform underneath it needed to match that scale.
For anyone who writes seriously – authors, academics, screenwriters – Scrivener is a known quantity. The Literature and Latte website is where people go for product information, support documentation, long-form blog content and customer resources. It is not a brochure site. It is a working tool for a large, active user base.
The existing platform was not keeping pace with what that required. With approximately 1,300 pages of content, the majority of them blog articles, the site had become difficult to maintain and the technical foundations were no longer fit for purpose. Performance, maintainability and the team’s ability to publish and manage content all needed improving.
The brief was deliberate and conservative: migrate the site to WordPress without changing anything users would notice. The design stays. The navigation stays familiar. The Paddle integration stays. The content stays. Everything that improves is under the surface.
What needed to change:
- The existing platform had become difficult to maintain at scale with 1,300 pages of content
- Technical foundations needed modernising to support performance and long-term search visibility
- The team needed a CMS they could use to publish and edit complex content without developer support
- Navigation needed reworking for clarity and scalability across such a large content set
- Existing integrations including Paddle needed to be preserved without disruption
Our approach
Project overview
A careful rebuild of a large, established software product website. Like-for-like migration from the existing platform to WordPress – existing design replicated, 1,300 pages migrated, Paddle integration preserved, and a bespoke Gutenberg block system built to support ongoing publishing at scale.
Design and build
- Existing design replicated precisely in a fully bespoke WordPress theme – users see no change
- Responsive behaviour carefully implemented for consistent experience across desktop, tablet and mobile
- Paddle integration and existing embeds preserved to avoid disruption to established workflows
- Mailing list functionality replicated to ensure continuity for the existing subscriber base
Content migration
- 1,300 pages of blog articles, support documentation and product content migrated into WordPress
- Content mapped into a clear structure for both user navigation and editorial management
- Existing URL structure and search equity protected throughout the migration
- Navigation reviewed and reworked for clarity and scalability across the full depth of the content archive
Content management
Bespoke Gutenberg block system built to match the site’s specific content needs. The team can create and edit complex page layouts – long-form blog posts, support articles, product documentation – without developer involvement for the vast majority of changes. For a site that publishes regularly across multiple content types, that independence is essential.
SEO and performance
Page structure, performance and responsiveness all improved as part of the rebuild – protecting and improving search visibility across 1,300 pages of evergreen content. For a site where a significant portion of traffic comes through search, the technical foundations of the platform are not a secondary consideration. They are commercial infrastructure.
A large content migration?
If you need to move a content-heavy site to WordPress without losing what you’ve already built – search performance, user experience, integrations – we should talk.
Tell us the scale of what you have and we will tell you how we would approach it.
The results
1,300+
Pages migrated into WordPress without disruption to users or loss of search visibility
Zero
Disruption to users – existing design, navigation and integrations preserved exactly as they were
100%
Of content manageable by the team – complex layouts published and edited without developer involvement
Improved
Page structure, performance and responsiveness all modernised as part of the rebuild – better foundations under an identical front end
Preserved
Paddle integration, mailing list functionality and existing content patterns all carried across without interruption
Scalable
A platform built for a site that will continue to grow – adding content, expanding documentation and publishing regularly without restructuring
Technical details
WordPress theme
Built on our own bare-bones WordPress starter theme. No inherited styles, no third-party framework dependencies, no bloat. Performance, clean markup and long-term maintainability were central to the build – a site with 1,300 pages of content that is used by a global audience every day needs to be fast and reliable, not just functional.
Gutenberg blocks
Bespoke Gutenberg block system built specifically for the site’s content types – long-form blog posts, support documentation, product pages and landing content. The system gives the Literature and Latte team the ability to build and edit complex layouts without developer involvement, maintaining the quality and consistency the site’s audience expects.
Paddle integration
Existing Paddle payment integration carried across and preserved exactly as it was. For a software product company, payment and purchase flows are not something you disrupt during a migration – the rebuild was structured around protecting those touchpoints from the outset.
SEO and migration
URL structure, meta data and page structure all reviewed and maintained as part of the migration. For a site with this volume of evergreen content – articles and documentation that continue to drive traffic years after publication – protecting search equity was a primary technical consideration, not an afterthought.
Why WordPress was the right platform for Literature and Latte.
A site with 1,300 pages of content is not just a website. It is a content archive. And a content archive has different requirements to a brochure site.
Most of the content on the Literature and Latte site was not published recently. It has been published over years – blog posts, tutorials, documentation, release notes – and continues to drive traffic long after it was written. That is the nature of evergreen content for a long-established software product. The platform managing it needs to handle that archive reliably, keep it fast, make it searchable, and let the team continue adding to it without friction.
WordPress is genuinely well suited to this. Its content management model – post types, categories, tags, archives – is built for exactly this kind of depth. The bespoke Gutenberg block system we built means the team can produce complex layouts for long-form content without developer support. The taxonomy structure keeps 1,300 pages navigable rather than overwhelming.
The migration itself was the hardest part. Moving a site of this size without disrupting users, without losing search rankings accumulated over years, and without breaking a payment integration that drives actual revenue – that requires careful planning rather than enthusiasm. We mapped the content, protected the URLs, preserved the integrations and delivered a site that users experienced as unchanged.
Under the surface it was entirely different. That is exactly what it needed to be.
