Dispensaire Français: a bilingual WordPress-to-Ghost rebuild for a medical and social charity

Client

Dispensaire Français – French Benevolent Society — a registered charity based in Hammersmith offering medical consultations, psychological consultations and social support to French speakers in the United Kingdom who have no private health cover or are in financial difficulty. English site: en.df-sfb.org.uk.

Industry

Medical and social charity — health and social action

Services provided

WordPress to Ghost CMS migration
Full rebuild of both the French and the English site
Bespoke Ghost theme, produced in both languages
Contact database migration and a newsletter in both languages
Volunteering and contact forms
Redirect plan and archiving of the old site
Managed Ghost hosting

Project objective

The Dispensaire was running on a bilingual WordPress stacking a translation plugin on top of three different page builders. The result was heavy, slow to change, and above all impossible for the team to maintain: every edit meant first working out which tool had built which block.

For a charity that directs vulnerable people towards care, that is a real problem: practical information has to be accurate and current, in both languages.

The challenge

Getting out of a heterogeneous WordPress stack without losing a decade of content
Serving two language audiences without shortchanging either
Carrying the old URLs across without breaking links accumulated since 2015
Keeping the old site consultable, for the record and for evidence
Migrating a sensitive contact database in line with GDPR

Solutions implemented

Two Ghost instances, not one multilingual site

The structural decision of the project: one Ghost for French, one Ghost for English, rather than a single installation juggling two languages.

It is the same model we apply elsewhere, and for the same reasons. Each site has its own back office, its own content base, its own settings. The English-speaking team cannot break the French site by editing the English one. And each site is indexed by Google as a site in its own right, with its own URLs — not as a variant of another.

A language switcher links the two, using flags drawn as inline SVG rather than emoji, which render differently depending on the operating system.

Two deliberately different configurations

One quirk worth stating, because it looks like an inconsistency and isn't: the two sites are not configured the same way.

On the French side, topic archives live at the root of the domain. On the English side, they stay in a dedicated sub-path, with a specific route for the news section. This is not an oversight: aligning English with French would make around fifteen archives unreachable, because articles already occupy those addresses. Each site has the configuration its own content demands.

Content and contact migration

All the content worth keeping was migrated and restructured in both languages, images included, with each site serving its own from its own CDN.

The contact base — 664 people — was migrated from the old emailing tool with nine labels reflecting the charity's actual structure: Société Clinique, Club Sénior, medical volunteers, social volunteers, donors, trustees, committee.

The Dispensaire was paying for a separate emailing service to reach those 664 people. Not any more: the newsletter goes out straight from the two Ghost sites.

The team writes a post — a clinic date, a Club Sénior reminder, a call for volunteers — and sends it to subscribers from the same interface they wrote it in. Signups from the site feed the list on their own, the labels make it possible to write to medical volunteers only or donors only, and each site keeps its own list: English-speaking subscribers don't get an email in French.

One monthly subscription fewer, one export-import step fewer, and a list the charity owns outright.

The old Google Forms were replaced with clearer forms, notably the volunteering application, which now routes applicants to the right area — medical, social or administrative.

Programme names stay in French

An editorial decision taken with the client and applied throughout: programme names are not translated. Club Sénior, Espace Santé Jeunes, Parcours Soutien Femmes, Société Clinique and Cercle des Amis stay in French on the English site. They are proper nouns: translating them would have made the charity unrecognisable to its own beneficiaries.

132 redirects and a practical guide

The redirect plan runs to 132 rules covering the old WordPress addresses, including the old English URLs that land on the French site and are now sent on to the English one. Every target was checked one by one.

The guide "Understanding the UK healthcare system" — NHS, IHS, GP registration, dental care, pregnancy, mental health — was built into the site as an evergreen page paired with a downloadable PDF, with question-and-answer markup that makes it eligible for Google's rich results. For a charity whose job is to orient newcomers, it is the single most useful piece of content on the site.

The old site archived, properly

Before the DNS cutover, the old WordPress was captured as 462 static pages and published at a dedicated address, kept out of search engines.

The archive is held in four copies, one of them made immutable at filesystem level and one stored in a versioned object store — deletion was tested and then restored, to confirm the chain actually holds. Automated monitoring raises an alert if the archive stops responding. A registered charity cannot afford to lose ten years of record.

A step-by-step approach

1️⃣ French site rebuild — bespoke theme, content migrated and restructured.

2️⃣ Duplication to English — a repeatable migration pipeline, a FR→EN address mapping table, images copied across to the English CDN.

3️⃣ Client review — a FR/EN comparison table worked through point by point, plus an automated pass that found eleven broken internal links, of which the client had spotted only one.

4️⃣ Archiving the old WordPress, before any cutover.

5️⃣ Go-live on df-sfb.org.uk and en.df-sfb.org.uk, with the 132 redirects and the removal of the indexing block inherited from the beta — until then the English site was invisible to Google.

Results

The Dispensaire has two independent, consistent sites the team can update with no technical help. The newsletter goes out from each site, in its own language, with no external emailing tool. The old addresses still work, the English site is indexed, and ten years of history remain consultable at a stable address.

Conclusion

A bilingual site is not a site with a language button: it is two sites, each of which has to stand up on its own, in its own language, for its own audience. Separating the instances costs a little more to build and makes everything afterwards simpler — indexing, proofreading, editorial governance, and the peace of mind of the team doing the publishing.

Does your charity need a bilingual website it can run itself?

Let's talk — or read about our website creation and hosting for associations.