From John

Why we built My Site Buddy

A 2 minute, 46 second story about the work that was getting buried and what changed when Web Moves built My Site Buddy.

Read the full story and transcript

Four days, fully documented

Four days.
37 commits.
Website work, clearly documented.

This is a documented four-day project for our own website. It shows the work that was completed, the Git history behind it, and the checks before anything went live. Every number can be checked.

See what was done See My Site Buddy
PROJECT 05
Client
Web Moves, our own site
Business
Search, digital PR and web development
Footprint
20+ years · 712-post archive · 16 published case studies
Platform
WordPress
Window
Aug 16 to Aug 19, 2026
Source
Git history · 37 commits · session logs

From the Git history

37
Commits
4
Active days
4
Changes published
72
Database migrations
21,107
Lines changed
9
Areas of work

How the time compared

Same scope. Less calendar time.

This estimate compares the same work done by a senior specialist with the time it took in this project.

Estimated time by hand one senior full-timer

M1 M2 M3

With My Site Buddy alongside every other client

D1–4 More time for the rest of the client work
About 20× less calendar time

The same scope was completed. A person checked every change before it went live.

Owner time

18 hours of owner time.

The project took four calendar days. Because every instruction is timestamped, we can estimate how much of the owner’s day it took.

Across the four days the owner sent 263 instructions, about 23,000 words. We show several time-gap rules instead of claiming one exact number.

Choose the time-gap rule

Gaps under 10 minutes count as working
11.8 h
Gaps under 15 minutes count as working
18.1 h
Gaps under 20 minutes count as working
20.3 h
Gaps under 30 minutes count as working
22.5 h

Day by day

Day Instructions First → last Hands on it
Sunday 58 11:53 – 22:40 3.7 h
Monday 81 08:11 – 20:46 5.3 h
Tuesday 57 13:11 – 19:45 3.7 h
Wednesday 67 08:55 – 17:50 5.4 h

The working day spanned 7 to 11 hours. The measured hands-on time was 4 to 5 hours a day. The rest of the time was available for other work.

310–510 hours of estimated senior work, with 18 owner hours

What was completed

What changed, step by step.

Nine parts of the project moved at the same time. Each work item shows the change and an estimate of the time it would take by hand.

WORK ITEM 01 / 09

Blog archive rebuilt, and audited end to end

Index and single templates rebuilt with real authorship, plus a full audit across all 712 published posts.

  • Authorship, read time, reviewer credit and in-page topic links on every post
  • Article, FAQ and Blog schema merged into the existing Yoast graph rather than fighting it
  • A srcset bug fixed that was handing browsers landscape crops for portrait image boxes
  • Search Console index-status and performance exports, internal-link fix list, rewrite shortlist, 116 images sourced and assigned
Estimated time by hand
~46–76 hrs
With My Site Buddy
in the sprint

WORK ITEM 02 / 09

Team profiles and the expert-authority layer

Entity and E-E-A-T plumbing built across the whole site, from the post type up.

  • Team member post type extended with eight field groups: headline, location, credentials, specialties, headline numbers, verified profiles, press
  • Profile pages for all five team members, cross-linked from About and Team, author archives redirected
  • Person schema with verified sameAs links; dead links pruned, logos kept
  • A 28-item press wall researched, link-checked and logo-sourced
Estimated time by hand
~28–44 hrs
With My Site Buddy
in the sprint

WORK ITEM 03 / 09

199 dead URLs recovered, carrying 624 referring domains

The unglamorous job that had been sitting on the backlog since a permalink change.

  • 199 URLs returning 404 after a permalink migration, every one a live backlink pointing at nothing
  • A slug resolver that recovers all of them in a single hop, covering legacy URL shapes no backlink tool had reported
  • Retired .php tool URLs given docroot stubs, because nginx answers a missing .php before PHP ever runs
  • Genuine 404s still 404
Estimated time by hand
~16–24 hrs
With My Site Buddy
in the sprint

WORK ITEM 04 / 09

Sixteen case studies, built from real client data

Every published figure re-derivable by a prospect in Ahrefs or Semrush.

  • 16 studies with hero, animated stat band and write-up, plus a single template
  • Data reconciled across Ahrefs, Semrush, DataForSEO and Search Console, which disagreed by up to three times on the same metric
  • Absolute traffic volumes republished as percentages, so nothing discloses a client's business size
  • Position-band reporting rather than site-level averages
Estimated time by hand
~40–64 hrs
With My Site Buddy
in the sprint

WORK ITEM 05 / 09

The social proof layer

Proof a visitor can check, in the places they actually look.

  • 19-logo client wall ordered best-result-first, 14 logos linking through to their case study
  • "Featured in" press banner: 20 publication marks, 17 linked to the article
  • Seven LinkedIn testimonials; three demo entries removed
  • A CSS bug fixed that was silently hiding 9 of 15 case-study cards at opacity 0 while they still occupied their grid cells
Estimated time by hand
~12–20 hrs
With My Site Buddy
in the sprint

WORK ITEM 06 / 09

Three service pages, and a template for the next five

10,500 words of published copy, plus the machinery to make the rest cheap.

  • A digital PR page carrying 23 mastheads and 31 cards, each a verbatim quote linked to the piece, drawn from a log of 534 placements across 207 publications
  • A web development page built around one real project, with figures out of the codebase: 58,000 lines of PHP, 449 classes, 900+ tests, an indexer rebuild from 427 queries to 26
  • An SEO page presenting SEO, GEO, AEO, AIO and SXO as a specification table
  • Seven reusable content blocks and a service-page base class, so the next service page is a content spec rather than a build
Estimated time by hand
~76–114 hrs
With My Site Buddy
in the sprint

WORK ITEM 07 / 09

Migration engineering and a deploy rehearsal harness

The infrastructure that makes content changes safe to ship twice.

  • 72 database migrations authored, each reversible and idempotent
  • A production deploy that failed three separate ways diagnosed and fixed: filename ordering, admin-only edits that were never captured, and a migration that ran a day before its assets were committed
  • 33 migrations renumbered so filename order is dependency order
  • A scratch-database rehearsal harness, because a preview environment only ever proves the order migrations were authored in, never the order they will run in
Estimated time by hand
~48–92 hrs
With My Site Buddy
in the sprint

WORK ITEM 08 / 09

The correctness pass, and mobile

Every unverifiable claim on the site found and replaced with a measured one.

  • A "100% penalty recovery success" claim retired for an Ahrefs batch analysis across 14 client domains: 20,740 keywords in Google's top three
  • ROAS corrected and confined to PPC; ROI confined to SEO; removed from digital marketing entirely, because one return figure across that spread describes none of it
  • Five conflicting founding dates reconciled to one
  • A single "hidden lg:block" class found that had been hiding the hero graphic, the conversion-rate figure and the sessions figure from every phone visitor
  • Nav drawer, coverage grid and header rebuilt for mobile at 390px
Estimated time by hand
~24–38 hrs
With My Site Buddy
in the sprint

WORK ITEM 09 / 09

AI-detection work, and a method that came out of it

Original research most agencies would sell as a standalone engagement.

  • Three new pages scanned on two AI-detection models and measured against a 70% human floor
  • A 712-post archive screened for donor material, authorship verified post by post; roughly 250 of the 2003–04 posts turned out to be syndicated guest articles
  • 23 excerpts selected and verified verbatim against their source at deploy time, so a misquotation fails the build rather than shipping
  • The finding, documented: rewriting composed prose does not move the number. Every composed card measured 0.99 AI; the archive quotes measured 0.002.
Estimated time by hand
~23–35 hrs
With My Site Buddy
in the sprint

Tools used

Tools used on this project.

The tools were connected to the project so the team could work with the website information in one place.

  • WordPress content · templates · redirects
  • PHP + MySQL theme code · database migrations
  • GitHub 37 commits · 4 deploys
  • Claude the buddy doing the work
  • Ahrefs keyword bands across 14 client domains
  • Semrush cross-checks on every figure
  • DataForSEO SERP and intent verification
  • Search Console index status · URL recovery
  • Pangram human-quality content checks
  • Headless browser mobile QA at 390px · screenshots
  • ACF flexible content · block library
  • Tailwind + Vite theme build pipeline
  • Utopia migrations reversible content shipping
  • SSH + deploys pipeline · auto migrations
  • MCP servers tool wiring per site
  • JSON-LD schema Article · Person · FAQ · Blog

16 tools · one project

Summary

About 410 hours of senior work. Completed in four days, directed in 18 hours.

At a realistic senior pace of about 160 focused hours a month, this scope is roughly two to three months of full-time specialist work. The work was completed in four days, a person checked every change before it went live, and the owner’s measured time was 18 hours.

Manual estimate
310–510 hrs
Equivalent duration
~2–3 months
My Site Buddy elapsed
4 days
Owner's hours
18
Time comparison
~20×
Estimated specialist time per owner hour
17–28×

How we estimated the time

Manual-hour estimates are based on individual types of work: long-form page copy at 4 to 5 hours per thousand words, including research and schema; case studies at 2.5 to 4 hours each, including data checks across tools; reversible database migrations at 30 to 60 minutes each; and development at a typical senior pace. The estimates assume a skilled specialist already knows the website and tools. They do not include onboarding, meetings, or time spent switching between projects. A real agency project with normal coordination would usually take more than three months.

The owner's hours are measured, not estimated. Every instruction is timestamped in the session log; the figure is the sum of gaps under fifteen minutes, with the other thresholds published above so you can pick your own.

Three things this page does not claim. The manual side is an estimate, and a different estimator could choose a different range. The work used twenty years of existing material from the archive, client results, and placement log; none of that material was created in four days. The measured hours also include rework: a failed deploy, pages based on an out-of-date document, and a correction that had to be partly reverted. It is a real week, not a clean run. Every My Site Buddy change was checked by a person before it went live.

Our own site. Four days. Work reviewed before it went live.

My Site Buddy keeps a website’s request, work, and review in one place. We used it on our own site first and published the project record.

See My Site Buddy