A technical overhaul for a Swiss author's WordPress presence

Oliver Martin is a Swiss entrepreneur, author and CEO based in Zurich. His site carries his books, including 31 Bridges, a long-running insights column on leadership and decision-making, and a press and media record that has to hold up when an editor or event organiser checks it. Around the main site sit three more web properties, a YouTube channel and a trail of external articles, all of which search engines were trying, and partially failing, to reconcile.

The brief, agreed up front with his assistant, was explicitly not an SEO strategy retainer. It was to make the WordPress foundation stop leaking credibility: a hand-written schema block that had been pasted in and was silently wrong, a plugin stack that had accreted without an owner, recurring Elementor errors on every edit, and images going out unoptimised on a site whose press photos are the product.

The work was surgery, not garnish. The schema was rewritten to say one consistent thing about the same person across the site, plugins were audited and cut to what earns its place, the Elementor errors were traced and fixed so the assistant could edit without fear, and image optimisation was set up as a pipeline rather than a hope. Backlink hygiene across the four sites and the YouTube channel closed the loop.

None of this is visible in a screenshot, which is rather the point: the site looks exactly as designed, it simply stopped working against itself.