Guesthouse site rebuilt in 4 days, in four languages

Situation

Mr Fox is a family guesthouse with four apartments in Druskininkai, a Lithuanian resort town. Its site ran on an old WordPress install (WordPress 4.9, the Flatsome theme, Polylang for languages) with no analytics or SEO plugins. The original domain, mrfox.lt, had been lost to a domain squatter, so the site lived on mfox.lt: a domain-wide redirect and Search Console’s change-of-address tool were both off the table. The backup held the files but not the database.

Task

• Rebuild the site to be fast and multilingual on the existing hosting plan: no backend, no database, no upgrade.
• Keep the old URLs that Google still had indexed from turning into 404s.
• Make the site’s real job measurable: guests booking directly, at 10% off the Booking.com price.

Action

1. A static site in four languages. Astro site in Lithuanian, English, Russian and Polish: apartments, gallery, booking, contact and a “things to do in Druskininkai” guide. Text was rebuilt from the live site and the photos reused from the backup.
2. No dead links. A 301 map from every old Polylang path, including the percent-encoded Cyrillic Russian ones, to its new page.
3. Search.
   • hreflang with x-default, canonical URLs and a 24-URL sitemap.
   • Structured data: LodgingBusiness, Accommodation, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList.
   • Search Console verified and used to drive fixes. When its Breadcrumbs report showed 0 items, I added BreadcrumbList. The Lithuanian apartments title was retargeted to the word people actually search (“nuoma”).
4. Measurement.
   • Google Analytics 4 with Consent Mode v2 and a cookie banner in all four languages; nothing is stored before the visitor accepts.
   • Events for contact clicks by channel (phone, WhatsApp, Telegram, email), visits to the booking page and exits to Booking.com.
5. Speed and delivery.
   • WebP images and a preloaded hero image, gzip and long-term caching. The built site went from 36 to 21 MB.
   • GitHub Actions deploys every push to the hosting, with a type check before each deploy.
6. Method. AI-assisted: Claude Code wrote code to rules I set; I reviewed every change and owned the decisions.

Result

• Live on mfox.lt in four days, on the same hosting plan.
• Links to the old site land on the matching new pages instead of 404s.
• The owner sees which channel each enquiry came from and how search finds the site in each language (analytics counts visitors who accept cookies).
• Phones get a sticky Call / WhatsApp / Book bar; the direct-booking discount is shown in all four languages.