The problem
Orthodoxie.com has published Orthodox Christian news in French every day since 2005; its publisher is in Chaville, outside Paris. Twenty-one years of WordPress had reached 28,904 posts, 30,217 attachments and 126 pages, a database of 1.96 GB and 29 GB of uploads in 343,136 files, on a self-managed server. Reading was gated: posts were restricted by default, with 3,365 posts and six pages public, and WooCommerce Subscriptions and Memberships held the paying readers. The page cache served the anonymous teaser to logged-in members, so the site carried a "click here to refresh" link as a workaround. Four categories had been removed because the GeneratePress and GenerateBlocks markup grew too large and failed Google's speed test. The muted text measured 2.10:1 against white, below the accessibility floor. And one constraint came first in the migration audit: the subscribers could not be lost.
What we did
We rebuilt the site on Next.js with Payload as the CMS, inside the same application, with admin and editor roles. The articles and 21 GB of images were migrated, and the staging database matched WordPress one for one, 28,836 of 28,836. Article addresses stay at the root of the domain as they were. Thirty-six redirects cover the old paths, and the other WordPress address forms (post numbers, date archives, attachment pages) are resolved on the fly.
The paywall runs on the server: a public teaser is computed per article and the body is sent per session, so no cache can show a member the wrong version. Readers sign in by a link sent to their email. Billing is Stripe's hosted checkout and portal, with a nightly check against Stripe's records. A contact form, a newsletter with double opt-in and a twice-weekly digest, one-click unsubscribe, full-text search in French and a night mode on every page are in. A directory of Orthodox places holds 426 entries with 887 contacts and 387 points on a map. An accessibility check over 18 pages, in day and night mode, runs before any change ships; the published statement says partially conformant, which is what the evidence supports.
Design and development are Elenion's. The illustrations are by Coric Design. The publisher supplied the archive, the logo and the masthead. The brief asked for a design that kept what worked for a traditional readership.
The hard part
Moving the paying subscribers off WooCommerce without charging anyone twice and without asking anyone to enter a card again. WooCommerce owned the subscriptions; Stripe held only the customers and their payment methods. The audit sorted 453 active subscriptions into 317 that could move automatically and 136 that needed a hand. We rehearsed the sequence in Stripe's test mode with test clocks, which fast-forward billing cycles: 16 of 16 moved with zero double charges, and the rehearsal exposed eight errors in the written procedure before any live account was touched. A later read of the live accounts found 374 on Stripe and 85 not yet there. The cutover will follow the rehearsed sequence, one step at a time, because this is the part that touches money.
What changed
As of this writing the new site is built and in release at a beta address; orthodoxie.com still serves the WordPress site, and the cutover is planned for December 2026. Nothing has been measured on production, so this study claims no result from launch. What is in place: an archive on a new engine with every address kept, a paywall the cache cannot break, billing on Stripe with a nightly check and a subscription move rehearsed to zero double charges. Performance, traffic and subscriber figures after launch will be the publisher's to share.