// the challenge
An e-learning business with 200+ courses and 3,000+ participants was rebuilding its WordPress site. Five years of data had to move across, and every student had to stay linked to their bookings and completed courses.
// what we did
We mapped how everything connects, designed a cleaner structure, then moved the data in order: courses, then participants, then bookings. Automated checks compared old and new data and fixed anything left unlinked.
// challenges
- deep relations between courses, participants and bookings
- five years of inconsistent custom fields, orphaned post meta and plugin leftovers
- zero data loss tolerance
- a new schema that still had to match legacy records
- ID mismatches from WordPress auto-increment IDs on import
// approach
- database blueprint of every relation and meta dependency
- new custom post type schema
- original IDs kept as _legacy_post_id meta during import
- multi-pass mapping scripts (courses, participants, bookings)
- automated cross-reference queries between old and new tables
// stack
- WordPress
- PHP
- WP-CLI
- MySQL
- Custom migration scripts
// the result
99%mapped automatically
3,000+participant histories preserved
200+courses relinked
“Migrating five years of complex student and booking data felt like a high-risk operation, but the execution was flawless. Everything transferred with incredible precision, and our new platform is significantly faster and easier to manage.”
Head of Product & Operations, High-End E-Learning Platform