From a broken WordPress install to a PageSpeed 94, AEO-ready practice site

Carina runs a psychotherapy practice in Bucharest serving both local Romanian clients and international patients in English. Her existing WordPress site had become the worst kind of problem: it technically worked, but underneath it was a mess.

A previous developer had left a /clone/ installation indexed alongside the main site, creating duplicate content that Google was actively penalizing. Her robots.txt had wildcard syntax errors that were blocking legitimate crawlers from key pages. Page speed was in the 40s on mobile. None of her 29 blog posts — each one actually useful, written by a practicing clinician — had meta descriptions, proper schema, or AEO-friendly structure. Her site wasn't showing up when people asked ChatGPT or Claude for a therapist in Bucharest. She was leaving high-intent clients on the table every week.

She didn't need a new logo or a ‘brand refresh.’ She needed the whole technical foundation fixed and the content operationalized.

I started with a full technical audit — crawl analysis, duplicate content map, schema inventory, PageSpeed waterfall, indexation status across Google Search Console. That surfaced the /clone/ problem, the robots.txt issue, and the total schema gap in about 48 hours.

From there, three parallel work streams:

The first was a complete theme rebuild in WordPress — new child theme scratch-built for performance, stripped of every legacy plugin the old stack depended on. I used Ruflo agent orchestration to develop three visual directions in parallel, which let Carina choose the aesthetic direction without committing to a 4-week design phase.

The second was SEO/AEO/GEO architecture: proper schema markup across every post, FAQ blocks on key service pages structured for AI-assistant citation, hreflang configured for RO/EN content, canonical consolidation to kill the duplicate content problem, and a complete rewrite of meta descriptions and titles for all 29 posts.

The third was tooling I built to keep the site tuned after launch — a custom SEO MCP server in TypeScript/Node that integrates WordPress REST API, Google Search Console, GA4, and uptime monitoring. It feeds a warm light-mode dashboard I use to monitor her site autonomously.

The theme itself is a custom WordPress child theme — clean PHP/JS, no page-builder bloat, lazy-loaded everything, Cloudflare CDN for global delivery. Local by Flywheel for development, WP-CLI for automation, Git for version control.

Schema markup includes: MedicalBusiness, Person (Carina with her credentials, specializations, languages), Service per offering, FAQPage on key pages, Article with author/datePublished/dateModified on every blog post, BreadcrumbList sitewide, and full hreflang implementation for bilingual RO/EN content.

The SEO MCP server I built for this project deserves its own mention: it's a TypeScript/Node tool that exposes WordPress REST, Search Console, GA4, and monitoring endpoints as MCP tools — so I can ask Claude Code to audit her site, pull a traffic report, or check for schema regressions and get structured answers back.

If I did this project again, I'd start the MCP server build earlier. I delivered the WordPress rebuild in weeks 1–4 and built the monitoring tool in weeks 5–6 — but some of the audit work in weeks 1–2 would have been faster if the MCP server was already running. Lesson: build the tool before you do the work the tool helps with, even if the tool takes a day longer.

I'd also push harder on content strategy from day one. We fixed the technical foundation and optimized existing posts, but the biggest remaining lift on her site is new content targeted at specific AEO queries.