Proposal
We spent this year building a ranking portal for plumbing.ca. It already runs 19 different lists. storage.ca is still a single WordPress box that can't generate a page for the one thing customers search for — unit sizes.
Reuse the portal for storage.ca rather than maintain a second, weaker system.
Close to nothing in infrastructure. The engine is built, paid for, and already multi-tenant.
One genuinely new piece of work — storage units — and two access questions we need answered.
Where we are
A WordPress site on one small server, launched January 2024 and largely untouched since.
Counted from their own sitemap today.
No redundancy. If that one machine fails, the site is down.
What we already own
The thing we built for plumbing.ca generates ranked, city-by-city lists automatically. It is already running far more than plumbing.
The opportunity · SEO
Someone looking for storage searches "10x10 storage unit Toronto" — a size, in a city, with intent to book. We publish nothing that matches that.
| Search intent | Pages we have | Pages the engine could publish |
|---|---|---|
| A named facility | 932 | 932 — kept |
| Storage in a city | 12 | 12, ranked and refreshed |
| A unit size in a city | 0 | 12 cities × sizes |
| Price comparison in a city | 0 | one per city |
The zero in that third row is the opening. Those are the highest-intent searches in this category — the person is ready to book — and today they land on a competitor.
See the mockups → — what these pages would actually look like, in storage.ca's colours.
The opportunity · leverage
Adding Calgary or Halifax is a line of config. On WordPress it's someone hand-building pages for a week.
The engine re-scores on a schedule. Our storage pages are a 2024 snapshot that ages every day.
Every improvement to the portal — speed, layout, schema — lands on storage.ca automatically.
Static files from a CDN instead of WordPress rendering per visit. Speed is a ranking factor.
Risk
Two snapshots exist, both from launch day in January 2024. A disk failure loses everything published since. This is a one-command fix and I can do it today — it needs no decisions from anyone.
The DNS settings we hold for storage.ca are inactive — the live ones are managed somewhere outside our AWS account, as is the CDN in front of it. We can't move the site until we know who holds them. This is the single biggest unknown in the plan.
There's a separate storage environment in our account that was updated yesterday. If that's the same initiative, these should merge before either goes further.
The work
Every category on the engine today ranks businesses. Storage is the first one where the customer compares what's inside the business — a 5×10 against a 10×20, by price.
One record per facility: name, address, rating, reviews. Enough to rank a plumber. A facility with twelve unit types collapses into a single row.
A record per unit type per facility — size, square footage, price, climate control, availability. This is what unlocks the comparison pages and the size-based searches.
Plan
Turn on backups for the current site. Find out who controls the domain and CDN. No dependencies — starts today.
Point the existing engine at one city and see whether the list it produces is credible. Cheap, reversible, and tells us early if storage needs different criteria than plumbing.
The only genuine engineering. Scope depends entirely on where the data comes from.
New version live on a test address while WordPress keeps serving customers. Nothing switches until we can compare them directly.
Move the domain once the new pages match on content and SEO. Old site kept available for a while, then retired.
Money
The infrastructure argument is easy: we're not buying anything. The engine, its load balancer and its storage are already running and already shared across 19 lists.
| Item | Status | Added monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| The ranking engine | Already running, shared | none |
| Page hosting + CDN | Already running, shared | negligible |
| Unit data storage | New | small |
| Current WordPress server | Retired after switchover | saving |
The real cost is engineering time on the units piece, and that number depends on the data-source decision.
Decisions
Sets the switchover path and most of the schedule. Everything else can proceed while we find out.
Facility feed, scraping, or manual. The biggest driver of how long this takes.
If so, merge before either goes further.
We can add ranked pages to the current site as a smaller first step instead of replacing it. Lower risk, faster to something visible.
Appendix · technical
For the engineering side of the room — this is the plumbing.ca stack storage.ca would join.
Appendix · technical
Read live from AWS account 490318453712 on 23 Sep 2026 — Route 53, ELB, ECS, Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, Lightsail, Cost Explorer. Page counts from storage.ca's own sitemap. A fuller technical walkthrough exists for the engineering review.