I rebuilt a website this weekend for the company my wife works for. Old stack: Avada plus 32 plugins. New stack: Core WordPress, Gutenberg, two small custom blocks I wrote myself. Total time: a couple of hours. A year ago that same migration would have taken me a full weekend, maybe longer.
The site had years of accumulated cruft. Avada shortcodes everywhere, page-builder markup nested five levels deep, plugins installed for one feature each and never removed. Normally that means reading every page by hand and figuring out what a shortcode was supposed to render before you can rebuild it in blocks.
Studio’s AI chat did that part. I imported the old site’s WXR export, then asked Studio’s AI to convert the Avada shortcodes in it into real Gutenberg blocks, and it did, correctly nested and ready to edit, not a rough placeholder I still had to clean up. That’s the feature that turned a weekend job into an afternoon one.
The rest of the tool holds up too. The preview screen has three toggles: frontend, wp-admin, and the database, so I could check what a change actually did without switching tabs. It also ships with built-in performance and SEO audit skills, so it caught a couple of slow, unoptimized images before they ever went live instead of after.
Two pieces the old theme only faked with sliders and jQuery, I rebuilt as proper Gutenberg blocks instead of hacking them back into shortcodes:
Crixu Tiltframe: rows of images that drift sideways at different speeds as you scroll the section into view.
Crixu Tiltwall: a full-bleed hero with a tilted, auto-scrolling image wall in the background, and a Cover-block-style overlay so any blocks can sit on top.
Both are open source. Tiltframe is already live on wp.org (source on GitHub); Tiltwall is submitted and awaiting review, with the source already on GitHub. If your theme fakes these effects with sliders and jQuery, feel free to use them instead.
None of this is AI replacing the work. It’s the boring, mechanical part of a migration, shortcodes into blocks, finally getting automated, which left me time for the two things that actually needed a person.
Leave a Reply