58-page Elementor exit for an energy sector client
The team exported their ACF JSON, ran a free crawl on the live Elementor site, reviewed classifications on staging, and imported 58 pages as drafts in half a day. Manual migration was scoped at 80+ hours; AIRA review and import took about 4 hours. After launch on the client’s new theme, mobile PageSpeed moved from 36 to 80 — a gain from the lighter block build, not from AIRA alone.
Pages migrated
0
Marketing pages only
Manual hours expected
0h+
vs ~4h with AIRA
Tooling cost
£0.82
58 credits at 79p
Blocks — no edit
0%
After review
Mobile PageSpeed
0→80
Post-launch on client’s new theme — not AIRA’s theme
~76 hours saved vs manual estimate on this project
Tooling: £45.82 (58 credits)
The challenge
The agency had won a fixed-price rebuild for a long-term energy-sector client — services, sectors, case study landings, and campaign pages all built in Elementor Pro. Migration was expected to take 80+ developer hours of copy-paste into a new ACF block theme (not built by AIRA). That line item was eating the margin before design work started.
Migration labour: manual vs AIRA
Anonymous production project — figures reported by the delivery team
Block accuracy after review
~24% of blocks still needed manual images (often SVGs)
- No edit 72%
- Minor edits 19%
- Major edits 9%
Approach
- 01
Block library first
Registered hero, features, testimonials, logo strip, FAQ, and CTA blocks on the new theme. Exported field groups before any crawl.
- 02
Crawl the rendered site
Pointed AIRA at the public Elementor front-end — not _elementor_data. Filtered out blog posts handled separately via WXR.
- 03
Review low-confidence rows
Sorted by ascending confidence. Reassigned three service landings from card-grid to features repeater. ~24% of blocks needed manual image uploads where SVG icons could not sideload.
- 04
Import, redirects, QA
Committed 58 credits, imported drafts via ACF Migrate, imported redirect spreadsheet, ran QA checklist before client review.
“We had eighty hours of migration on the quote. We finished review and import in an afternoon. Same content, native blocks — we kept the margin.”
Technical director, UK agency (anonymous)
Lessons
- lightbulbCrawl rendered HTML, not Elementor JSON — matches what SEO and visitors saw.
- lightbulbBudget a short image pass for SVG-heavy Elementor icon boxes.
- lightbulbPageSpeed gains on this project came from exiting Elementor onto the client’s native block theme — AIRA moved content; the theme team owned performance.
- lightbulbKeep blog posts on WXR; use AIRA for builder-heavy marketing pages.
FAQ
Was this a real client project?expand_more
Yes — a real energy-sector rebuild, anonymised. The agency name and end-client brand are withheld. Figures were reported by the delivery team from AIRA production usage.
Why 80+ hours manual vs 4 hours with AIRA?expand_more
Manual work was field-by-field copy into repeaters across 58 sector and service landings with repeating Elementor patterns. AIRA classified sections in bulk; the team spent roughly four hours on review, SVG image gaps, and import — not eighty hours of copy-paste.
Did AIRA improve PageSpeed from 36 to 80?expand_more
Not directly. Mobile PageSpeed rose after launch on the client’s new ACF block theme (built by the agency, not AIRA). AIRA migrated content into that theme’s blocks; removing Elementor and shipping a leaner front end drove the score — migration made the rebuild possible on schedule.
Anonymised project — figures reported by delivery teams
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