Homeward Bound

A careful move from Joomla to WordPress for a pet memorial service, with every memory carried over.

Role: Migration & development
Platform: WordPress
Client: Indiana, United States
Year: 2022

“Years of cherished memories, moved safely to a new home.”

Project summary — at a glance

ArchitectureCustom plugin, structured data migration

WorkJoomla to WordPress migration & fixes

CompanyHomeward Bound Pet Memorial — US

ResultComplete, seamless migration

About the project

Client location — Indianapolis, USA

What the build set out to do.

Homeward Bound Pet Memorial is a locally owned pet cremation and memorial service in Indiana, helping families honour their pets with dignity. Their Joomla website held years of memorial pages, service packages and family stories, and it needed a more reliable, easy-to-manage home on WordPress.

I built a custom plugin to transfer every piece of data from Joomla to WordPress, then fixed the functionality issues along the way, so nothing meaningful was lost in the move.

Visit the live site ↗

Developer role — 05 phases

How the project ran, start to handover.

The challenge

The site held years of memorial pages that families treasure, so the move had to be flawless. The challenge was to:

Migrate all content from Joomla without losing a single record.
Keep every memorial page, image and detail intact.
Fix the functionality issues holding the site back.

My role

I handled the migration end to end: auditing the Joomla site, building a custom plugin to transfer the data, fixing functionality issues and testing everything before launch.

Audit & data mapping

Before moving anything, I studied how the Joomla site stored its content. Three findings shaped the plan:

Joomla and WordPress structure content differently, so data needed careful mapping.
Memorial pages, images and service details each needed their own handling.
Manual copying would be slow and error-prone at this scale.