Keck School of Medicine of USC

The Keck School of Medicine is part of the University of Southern California, the oldest private research university in California. With 23 schools and nearly 50,000 students across the broader university, Keck operates in one of the most demanding digital environments in higher education, where every page tends to be cited, indexed, and linked from somewhere that matters. When Keck decided to refresh its online presence, they brought in Digital Pulp to lead the redesign. The redesign was the visible part of the project. The invisible part, moving the existing content into the new home, came to us.

Keck’s digital footprint had grown the way most large institutions’ digital footprints grow, which is to say organically and across a sprawl of subdomains and microsites. Years of newsroom articles, faculty pages, research updates, and program content lived in places they had ended up rather than places they had been planned to live. The legacy newsroom alone held nearly a decade of articles, more than a thousand URLs, and the kind of accumulated duplicates and inconsistencies that always show up in a content library that has outlived its original structure. Some of that content carried real SEO weight. Some of it was linked from journals, press coverage, and partner institutions. None of it could quietly disappear.

The PPHS site was a good example of the problem. It had its own subdomain, its own author accounts, its own newsroom, and its own years of archived articles. Moving it into the new Keck environment was not a question of copy and paste. It was a question of how to relocate a working publication without breaking the citations pointing at it, losing the editorial team’s access, or dropping any of the metadata that made the content findable in the first place. And the Keck team had a parallel website project to run. They needed a partner they could hand the migration to and stop thinking about.

The redesign was already in motion when we joined the project. The decisions that mattered for us were not about what the new site should look like. They were about how to move the old one without anyone outside the project noticing.

The first decision was to treat the migration as a sequence of contained phases rather than a single launch. Trying to move every subdomain, microsite, and newsroom in one pass would have multiplied the risk of any single mistake. Splitting it allowed us to validate the approach on the first phase, learn what was different about each property, and apply that learning to the next one. The PPHS migration became its own phase, which we labeled internally as Phase 1.5 because it sat between the initial cleanup work and the larger remaining migration. Naming it that way kept everyone honest about what it was, which was a complete migration in its own right rather than a small task tucked into a bigger project.

The second decision was to take redirects seriously as a strategic problem rather than a technical chore. With more than a thousand URLs moving between domains, manually mapped redirects would have been both error-prone and unmaintainable. We designed automated 301 redirect rules that could handle the scale of the move, so that the old URLs pointing at the old PPHS subdomain and the legacy newsroom would resolve cleanly to their new, friendlier locations inside the Keck environment. This was the difference between a migration that protected Keck’s accumulated search authority and one that quietly bled it away.

The third decision was about content hygiene. A migration is the one moment in a website’s life when every page is being touched anyway. We treated that as an opportunity to clean up rather than carry forward. The legacy newsroom had duplicate posts that had accumulated over the years, and rather than carry that mess into the new site we worked through the content to make sure each article landed once and landed correctly. Metadata got normalized to match the new site’s structure. Assets were checked and reorganized. We also rebuilt the post structure to use Gutenberg blocks with custom fields specific to Keck’s editorial needs, which meant the new newsroom would be easier for their team to work in than the old one.

The fourth decision was about handoff. The new site needed to be one the Keck team could run themselves once we were done with the migration phase. That meant we trained their content providers on how to use the new block structure, how to add articles, and how to manage the editorial content around them. A migration that leaves the client dependent on the agency for every update is not really finished.

The migration ran on WP Engine, with the new Keck environment as the destination and the old subdomains and legacy newsroom as the sources. We moved nearly a decade of articles into the new Gutenberg-based structure, deduplicated where the old database had drifted, and rebuilt author profiles and editorial access so that the people producing the content could keep producing it without waiting on us. We implemented and automated the 301 redirect rules across more than a thousand URLs so that the existing link graph kept working. Along the way, when the Keck communications team surfaced a specific need around media mentions that did not fit any of the existing blocks, we built a custom Gutenberg block to handle it. That was not part of the original scope, but it was the right call given where the work was already touching the codebase.

The technical work that mattered here was not novel architecture. It was the careful execution of a high-stakes move where the wrong shortcut would have shown up months later as broken citations and lost search rankings.

Keck now operates on a unified digital footprint where the newsroom, the school’s main content, and the surrounding programs share a single environment. The editorial team works inside one system rather than several, with a block structure built for the way they actually publish. The institution’s accumulated search authority moved with the content rather than getting left behind in the old subdomains.

The operational difference is the part that mattered most to the Keck team. The migration ran through successive stages from development to staging to production with the QA they needed at each step, which meant they did not have to micromanage the work and could focus on the rest of the relaunch. As the Head of Digital put it, the engagement eased load on their team so they could focus on other aspects of the broader project, and they were able to make the most of their billable hours with us as a result.

The partnership has continued past the original migration phase. We are still working with Keck today, handling ongoing migration of the remaining USC properties, maintaining the new environment, and building new features as their needs evolve. The relationship has moved from project to long-term partnership, which is generally where the real value of this kind of work shows up.

“Their project manager was among the best I’ve worked with. She is a professional who keeps chaos at bay and can see both the strategic view and tactical needs simultaneously. As a result, we were able to meet deadlines and pivot as needed when unforeseen events required adjustments to project plans.”

“The team and depth of technical expertise are impressive. Also the fact that we had direct contact, almost 24/7, with the product manager, engineer and other key players.”

— Head of Digital, Keck School of Medicine of USC