Turning a supplier’s listing pages into our own

Manual migration is where projects quietly lose a fortnight. A hundred listings at twenty minutes each is more than a working week of somebody copying text between two browser tabs, and getting steadily worse at it.

What it automates

• Reads a listing page and produces a finished page in the site’s own page builder shortcodes, so the result is editable afterwards like anything else.
• Drops the supplier’s pricing sections, which do not apply and must not be republished.
• Uses the second image rather than the first as the hero, because the first is almost always a logo or a placeholder.
• Converts imperial measurements to metric, since the source lists in feet and the audience thinks in metres.
• Builds galleries with the theme’s native gallery shortcode rather than raw markup.
• Deduplicates titles, so a heading is not repeated immediately under itself.

The point

None of those rules is clever on its own. Together they are the difference between output that needs editing on every page and output that is publishable as it stands. A migration tool is only worth writing if the last ten per cent — the small consistent judgements a person would make — is in the tool rather than left for the person.