CSR Tools left WordPress behind and got a site that is 7× faster to load
CSR Tools helps 300+ organisations report under the EU's CSRD rules. Its site had grown into 200+ pages, five paid plugins and a very slow load. They rebuilt the whole thing off WordPress with ShiftPress, kept every page, and now edit it by prompt.
IndustryCSRD / ESG reporting
Pages200+
LanguagesGerman & English
PlatformWordPress → ShiftPress
7×
faster page load
from 2.4 s to 0.3 s
90%
lighter pages
from 14.3 MB to 1.6 MB
78%
fewer files to load
from 259 to 58
12 h
saved every week
no more manual upkeep
Measured on the home page, desktop, same network. Search Console traffic results are being tracked over the weeks after launch.
Who they are
Pragmatic tools for a complicated new law
CSR Tools is a German platform that makes sustainability reporting doable for normal teams. It sells ready-to-use templates, workshops and consulting for the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the ESRS standards and the voluntary VSME standard for smaller companies.
More than 300 organisations use it, including Deutsche Welle, the Goethe-Institut, NDR, Coop, DATAGROUP and FIEGE. The content is deep and it grows constantly as the rules change, which is exactly why the old website had become hard to run.
The challenge
What hurt on WordPress
The site worked, but keeping it running had turned into a second job. Four things stood out.
Five plugins and themes to pay for
Basic things needed five different paid WordPress plugins and themes. The bill kept growing and every one of them was another thing to license, update and trust.
An admin full of plugin ads
The WordPress dashboard was cluttered with plugin upsells and banners. Every simple edit meant working around adverts for products the team never asked for.
Regulation changes meant hours of manual edits
When the rules changed, 15 blog articles had to be updated by hand, one at a time. It ate hours the team did not have, every time the law moved.
Updates kept breaking the site
Every WordPress update was a gamble. Plugins and the theme would clash and the site would break or stop loading correctly until someone fixed it. Hours lost, and a live site you could never fully trust.
The migration
How the move actually went
ShiftPress does the heavy lifting and keeps the site live the whole way. Here is the path CSR Tools took.
Step 1
Capture the whole site
ShiftPress read all 200+ pages straight off the live WordPress site, in both German and English, including every blog article. Nothing had to be copied over by hand.
Step 2
Rebuild as code, with a design refresh
The content came back as a fast static site, and the whole site got a design update, not just the home page: a warmer, more modern look with real product shots, clearer calls to action and trust markers, instead of the old flat grey banners. A single chat message then tuned every page for mobile, so the site looks right on phones across the board.
Step 3
Protect the SEO before cutover
Redirects, canonical tags, bilingual language tags and the sitemap were generated from the content, so the old WordPress addresses point at their new home. This is the part that keeps rankings from slipping after a move.
Step 4
Go live with no downtime
The new site went live without a maintenance window. Visitors never saw a gap.
Step 5 · ongoing
Run it by prompt
Editing is now a conversation. The 15 articles that once took hours to update by hand were done in one prompt in about five minutes. And new blog articles now write themselves with Blog Autopilot, which turns topics and keywords into ready-to-publish, SEO-ready drafts.
Design changes
Same brand, sharper site
The move was a chance to modernise the whole site, not just the front page, without losing what made it CSR Tools. The home page below shows the change, and one chat message optimised every page for mobile.
Before · WordPress
A flat grey hero and a plain logo strip. Functional, but dated and heavy at 14 MB.
After · ShiftPress
A photographic hero in the brand green, a real product shot, a topic badge and two clear buttons. Loads in 0.3 s.
Home page, desktop viewport, before and after the rebuild.
“
The migration experience with ShiftPress was very seamless with fantastic support. We are now saving 12 hours per week updating our website and adding new blog articles.
Corinna SpahnCo-founder, CSR Tools
Performance
Faster, lighter, simpler
Every image, font, script and stylesheet a page uses is a separate file the visitor's browser has to fetch. The old WordPress home page pulled 14.3 MB across 259 of these files, and the server took over a second just to start responding. The new static site loads 1.6 MB across 58 files and responds almost instantly.
Measured on the home page
Before (WordPress)
After (ShiftPress)
Full page load
2.44 s
0.33 s
Page weight
14.3 MB
1.6 MB
Separate files to load
259
58
Server response (first byte)
1.15 s
0.12 s
None of this needed a plugin. Speed, security and the clean markup search engines like are built into the platform, so there is nothing to buy, update or babysit.
SEO: before vs after
Rankings protected, results on the way
A migration only counts if your search traffic survives it. Every old URL redirects to its new home, canonicals and bilingual language tags are correct, and a fresh sitemap went to Google on day one.
Measurement in progress
CSR Tools rebuilt its site off WordPress in mid-2026. Google recrawls and re-ranks a site gradually over the weeks after a big change, so the before-and-after Search Console numbers land in the first weeks after launch. We will publish the clicks, impressions and average-position comparison here as soon as the data matures.
“
Our new static site loads about seven times faster than the old WordPress site, and we moved 200+ pages without losing a single one.
Corinna SpahnCo-founder, CSR Tools
Thinking about leaving WordPress?
ShiftPress moves your whole site to fast, secure code, protects your rankings, and lets you run it by prompt. Join the waitlist and skip the plugins.
ShiftPress read the whole live WordPress site automatically and rebuilt it as a static site, so the heavy lifting took hours rather than the weeks a hand-rebuild of 200+ pages would need. The ShiftPress support team handled most of that work, and the cutover to csr-tools.com happened with no downtime.
Did CSR Tools lose any pages or rankings? +
No pages were lost. Redirects, canonical tags, bilingual language tags and the sitemap were generated automatically from the content, so the old WordPress URLs point at their new home. Search Console performance is being measured over the weeks after cutover.
How much faster is the static site? +
The new home page loads about seven times faster than the old WordPress version (roughly 0.3 s versus 2.4 s), is about 90 percent lighter (1.6 MB versus 14.3 MB) and needs 78 percent fewer files to load (58 versus 259).
How does CSR Tools update articles now? +
By prompt. When a regulatory change meant 15 blog articles had to be updated, what used to be hours of manual editing in WordPress became a single prompt in ShiftPress that finished in about five minutes. For small changes and fixes, the team can also still edit text and images directly on the page with the built-in inline editor, no prompt needed.
