Project
WhichCar
Moving one of Australia’s biggest motoring publishers off a headless CMS and onto WordPress
WhichCar is Wheels Media’s motoring network, carrying the work of three of Australia’s best known car titles: Wheels, which has been published since 1953, MOTOR, and WhichCar itself. It is where Australians go to work out which car to buy, and it publishes daily. The site ran on Sanity, a headless content system, with its images on Amazon Web Services. Wheels Media wanted the whole thing on WordPress instead, and they wanted readers not to notice.
Project Scope
- Sanity to WordPress migration
- Custom WordPress theme and blocks
- Vehicle taxonomy and model pages
- Google Ad Manager integration
- Site search on Elasticsearch
- Image delivery on Cloudflare
- Ongoing development and support
The challenge
For a publisher, the archive is the business. More than 30,000 articles going back years, each one still earning search traffic, still carrying advertising, still linked to from somewhere. Changing platform means every one of those articles has to arrive on the other side with its address, its images, its galleries, its author and its car tags intact. Get a slice of it wrong and you are not looking at a bug, you are looking at a drop in revenue.
The design had to survive too. Readers should be able to visit the morning after a platform migration and see the site they know. And the same job was waiting for a second masthead: 4X4 Australia runs the same kind of site under its own brand, and Wheels Media had no interest in paying for the same work twice.
What I built
A custom WordPress build that reproduces the site readers already knew, plus the tooling to move the entire archive into it. WhichCar is the foundation, and 4X4 Australia runs on the same codebase with its own branding on top.
The archive, moved intact
More than 30,000 articles with their images, galleries, authors, categories and vehicle tags, lifted out of Sanity and rebuilt in WordPress. The import was written as a repeatable pipeline, so it could be run, checked, corrected and run again until it was right, rather than being a single nervous night.
Pages the editors build themselves
The theme ships more than 40 content blocks, so an editor can assemble a comparison, a buying guide or a landing page without a developer. Every make and model has its own hub page that gathers the relevant reviews, news and advice automatically as new stories are published.
Advertising that keeps earning
Ad revenue pays for the journalism, so the Google Ad Manager setup came across in full: slot sizing per breakpoint, lazy loading so ads load as a reader reaches them, refresh rules tied to what is actually on screen, and audience targeting. None of it changed shape in the move.
Search and speed at scale
Thirty thousand articles are only useful if a reader can find the one they want, so site search runs on Elasticsearch with type-ahead suggestions, tuned so a headline match counts for more than a passing mention. Images are delivered through Cloudflare, which keeps pages quick under the traffic a national masthead pulls.
Across the site
Articles: byline, gallery and share, on any screen
Model pages: every car gets its own hub
The result
WhichCar has been running on WordPress since 2025, with the design, the addresses and the advertising all where readers and advertisers left them. 4X4 Australia followed onto the same codebase, so a feature built once now serves both mastheads. The editorial team publishes without waiting on a developer, which was the point of the exercise.
I have stayed on as the site’s developer since launch. That means new features for the editors, WordPress and plugin updates, performance work, and keeping a site of this size fast while it absorbs the volume of automated crawling that any large publisher now attracts.
If you are weighing up a platform move, or you run a site big enough that the migration is the scary part, I would like to hear about it. Read more about WordPress consulting and migration planning, see the LEGO Star Wars: The Exhibition build, or get in touch.
Phil is an absolute pro to work with and undertook a website migration for us that seemed near impossible. Phil’s ability to understand our previous Sanity-based CMS and AWS-based tech stack was key to enabling a migration to a WordPress solution. His broad understanding of website development ensured we were able to migrate thousands of WhichCar, Wheels, Motor and 4X4 Australia articles and images to a WordPress solution whilst retaining the pre-existing site design, SEO performance and business-critical features…
Common questions about this project
Yes, if the URLs are treated as part of the migration rather than an afterthought. On WhichCar the articles kept the addresses they already had, so existing links, bookmarks and search results still work. Where an address had to change, a redirect catches it. That is the single biggest factor in whether traffic survives a platform move.
A headless setup splits the content system from the website, which usually means a developer is needed for changes an editor should be able to make alone. WordPress puts publishing back in the hands of the editorial team and has a far larger pool of people who can work on it. The trade-off is that WordPress needs looking after properly at this scale, which is what the ongoing support covers.
WhichCar ran from late 2024 to launch in 2025, with 4X4 Australia following on the same codebase. Most of that time went into the custom theme and the import tooling rather than the content move itself. The import was built to be run, checked and run again, so the final switchover was a routine repeat of something already rehearsed many times.
Yes. WhichCar and 4X4 Australia are national mastheads with tens of thousands of articles, advertising revenue tied to page performance and an editorial team publishing daily. Sites at that scale need someone who thinks about hosting, caching, search infrastructure and load as part of the build, not as a separate problem for later.
I stayed on as the site developer. That covers new features for the editorial team, performance and security work, WordPress and plugin updates, and responding when something needs attention. For a business that earns its money through its website, launch is the start of the relationship rather than the end of it.
It can, and it is usually cheaper than running separate sites. WhichCar and 4X4 Australia share a single codebase, with each masthead adding its own branding and site-specific behaviour on top. A feature built once is available to both, which is a real saving for any group running several titles or several regional brands.
