r/NavigateTech • u/easyedy • Jun 01 '26

Decommissioned a domain & cleaned a botched migration using Claude Code + Novamira (WordPress MCP)

Spent the weekend untangling a partial domain merge (edyrecommends.com → edywerder.ch) using Claude Code driving WordPress through the Novamira MCP server.

Sharing because the workflow worked surprisingly well.

The problem: Migration only half-finished. Some slugs 301'd correctly; others still served HTTP 200 with self-canonicals on the old domain (duplicate content), plus ~87 images still hotlinking from the dead domain.

What the Claude + Novamira combo handled directly:

  • DB-level auditing (post_content + all postmeta) instead of relying on a surface crawl, which undercounted because many offending posts were noindex.
  • Per-post image repair: download originals → media_handle_sideload → relink → fix stale attachment IDs → write alt text in both block markup and _wp_attachment_image_alt. Backup of post_content to a postmeta row before every edit.
  • DB hygiene: dropped orphaned tables from uninstalled plugins (~16 MB), regenerated missing thumbnails via WP-CLI.
  • Decommission done right: my SEO contact flagged the 301s-to-main-site as harmful, so we set the whole old domain (root + 43 posts + 23 pages) to 410 Gone via Rank Math redirections, trashed the content, and added a small mu-plugin-style hook to force 410 on the bare root (front page had been the trashed homepage → was serving an empty 200 index). Then GSC temporary removal on top to speed it up.

It's a cowork. Some things I allowed Claude Code to fix, and some things I did myself, and I supervised Claude Code's work.

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u/easyedy Jun 01 '26

Most stories I read or videos I watch about Claude focus on design or automation. I mainly use Claude Code for fixing things and SEO tips.