Getting a Furniture Maker Off Weebly, On His Schedule

Why He Moved

In June 2026, Weebly announced it would wind down service in 67 countries, citing “changes in regulation” and a wish “to simplify our global operations.” Sites in those countries were unpublished on 27 September 2026, and their owners lose account access on 26 December. The United States isn’t on the list. (What the notice means for other Weebly owners is in Is Weebly shutting down?)

On 4 September a sales email from a company selling Weebly migrations reached Rob, and he forwarded it to me. He had read it carefully: “Weebly isn’t shutting down the USA sites but this isn’t good news for me.” He was right on both counts. Nothing was going to switch off his site that month. But the company that owns the platform under his business had started shrinking it, and a builder that’s being trimmed country by country is one you want to leave on your own schedule, not on a 90-day notice.

The email was selling an automatic import. That’s the move a deadline pushes people into: it brings the content across, but nobody decides where each old address should go once the site’s structure changes. Rob had a few weeks to do it properly instead, so I did. We spoke on 20 September, and his new site went live on 22 October, seven weeks after he forwarded the news.

What Is Live

Robert Russell Designs is Rob Showalter, a furniture maker in Geneva, Illinois, outside Chicago. He designs and builds one-of-a-kind dining and conference tables, sculptural table bases and architectural wall art, and he delivers and installs them. His new site went live on 22 October 2026. I designed and built it, and my name is in the footer.

The sitemap lists 58 pages. A home page. Four category pages for conference tables, custom furniture, sculptural bases and wall art. A dining tables page with fifteen named collections under it, each one built around pieces he has actually made. Fourteen answer pages for the questions buyers ask before they commission a table, a blog, a trade section for designers and architects, and the pages that explain how a commission works. Three more pages built only for paid traffic stay out of the index. A fourth, his long-standing landing page, keeps its ranking address.

The Work Is the Proof

A buyer spending thousands on one table wants to see the maker’s hands in it. So his own photographs fill the galleries, published as he shot them. No tonal grade, no vignette, no filter. An earlier draft ran an exposure pass over every image, and real walnut came out looking like a catalog render. I took it out.

The banners and index tiles are different. They’re renderings built from his finished pieces and checked against them, because a phone photo in a workshop doesn’t make a banner. The table in each rendering is his. The photographs below are not renderings.

Rob’s photographs, resized for the web and nothing else.

Drawn Before a Board Is Cut

A commission starts with a conversation about the room, then the wood and the drawing. Before a buyer approves anything, they see the design, the proportions, the materials and the finish: a drawing of the actual piece, a 3D model and a physical sample board. Nothing is cut until the drawing is approved. On the home page and the process page, his design model sits beside the finished table it became, so a buyer can see that the drawing is the thing that gets built.

The pages built for paid traffic lead with that step as the offer: “Your table, drawn. Free, and by hand.” A buyer sends the room, and Rob sends back a drawing and a real price range, usually within a few days. The site points people toward the drawing rather than toward a generic contact form, because a person who has seen their own table drawn for their own room is further along than a person who typed a message.

The Address Book

The old site ran on Weebly. I crawled it on 20 September 2026 before building anything: 45 URLs and 223 images. Rob’s own writing, 33 files and 20,585 words of it, was migrated word for word before any page was rebuilt. He’d written it, it already described his work in his voice, and it was the part of the old site worth keeping.

Every old address I found before launch got a decision in a redirect map: keep it, send it to its new page, or retire it.

Then I checked the addresses search engines actually send people to. Search Console showed 66 old URLs with impressions in the last sixteen months, and I tested every one against the new site after launch. Ten returned a 404. I added nine of them to the map, each redirecting in one hop, including the old trestle tables page, which had 2,705 impressions on its own and now lands on his X-based trestle collection. The tenth had one impression in sixteen months and was left as a 404.

That brought the map to 113 rows. Requested against the live site, 112 reach a working page in one redirect or fewer: 34 serve their page directly and 78 arrive through one permanent redirect, the old .html page addresses among them. The one that doesn’t is a broken video channel path, removed on purpose.

The Ads Moved the Same Night

Rob runs Google Ads, and I manage them. Until launch, his ads ran to a separate landing-page site I’d built for them, and a few sitelinks still pointed at old Weebly pages. The same night the new site went live, 22 ads and 39 sitelinks were moved onto their pages on it. I read the account back afterwards and none still pointed at an old address.

Calls are tracked through WhatConverts, with a dynamic number on the site so a call can be traced to the page and the ad behind it. I checked every number in the pool on the live site, and I sent a test inquiry through the form on launch day and watched it arrive as a lead with its notification email.

Set Up to Be His

The site is hosted in a Cloudflare account set up in Rob’s business name, and its analytics live in an organization of his own. Both are set up to hand over to him. The form endpoint and the Search Console property still sit with me until that handover is done. The point is that if he ever wants to work with someone else, there’s nothing to untangle and nothing held hostage.

What I Did Not Claim

This is a build write-up, published the day the site went live. There’s no lead, traffic or ranking figure on this page, because there’s no post-launch data yet and I’d be guessing. The paid account’s lead history is real but too small to publish as a result.

Mobile speed is the open item. Most of the load on a phone comes from third-party tags rather than the pages themselves. On 23 October I moved the tag manager to start after the page has loaded, so the first screen no longer waits on it, but the tags still run, and that work isn’t finished.