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Timberland & Land Brokerage

Wise Batten, Inc.

From end-of-life Drupal to a fast, searchable land marketplace.

Custom WordPress Build Drupal Migration & Content Carryover Property Listing System Technical SEO & Structured Data Email Marketing & Lead Capture Managed Hosting & Security
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Client
Wise Batten, Inc.
Industry
Timberland & Land Brokerage
Year
2026
Live Site
wisebatten.com
Services
Custom WordPress Build Drupal Migration & Content Carryover Property Listing System Technical SEO & Structured Data Email Marketing & Lead Capture Managed Hosting & Security
The Challenge

What brought this timberland & land brokerage business to me

Wise Batten has brokered timberland and plantations across South Carolina and Georgia since 1978, but their website ran on Drupal 8, which stopped receiving security patches in 2021. The content underneath was genuinely good: 29 real properties with acreage, pricing, photo galleries, and downloadable sales packets built by foresters who walk the land. The presentation was years behind the business. The mobile homepage hero overlapped itself, the footer still read 2022, the privacy policy contained another company's email address, and every listing change had to go back through their old developer. A firm selling eight-figure plantations was doing it on a site that looked abandoned.

The Solution

What we built together

We rebuilt the site as a hand-coded WordPress build and carried every piece of their content across: 29 active properties with 556 photos and 197 sales packet PDFs, plus 73 sold tracts kept as a public track record. Properties became a real content type with state, county, type, and status filters, so a buyer can narrow to exactly the land they want and the office can post a new tract in minutes. Each property gets a full dossier page with an aerial map pin, gallery, downloadable packets, and an inquiry form that records which tract the buyer asked about. We also built a Listing Blast tool into their dashboard that turns live inventory into a branded Mailchimp campaign in one click, and every old Drupal URL redirects so nothing they had ranked for was lost.

Custom WordPress website, no page builders or templates
Full migration off end-of-life Drupal 8
Property listing system with 29 tracts, 556 photos, and 197 sales packets
Interactive aerial maps with per-property GPS pins
Per-property inquiry forms with layered spam filtering
Real estate structured data on every listing
One-click Mailchimp listing blasts from the dashboard
Hunting lease and forestry service sections
Client-editable pages with a simplified owner dashboard
Managed hosting, SSL, caching, and same business day updates
The Results

What changed after launch

First listing blast reached 1,848 subscribers with a 48% open rate and 10% clicking through to the site.

Desktop Lighthouse scores of 97 to 99, with every page painting its largest element in about a second.

Perfect 100 for accessibility, best practices, and SEO on the main pages.

Mobile performance went from 69 to 93, and one page from a 13.4 second load to 2.7 seconds.

Off end-of-life software that had gone four years without a security patch.

Fully client-editable, though they choose Hands-Off and we turn new listings around the same business day.

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