I recently took on a small project to make some content updates to a website for a local dentist. As we dug into the site to make the minor changes, we quickly realized that the theme and server needed an entire overhaul. For one thing, the website wasn't yet mobile friendly and lacked a responsive design. Also, it had been mirrored on a subdomain as well and both sites were exact duplicates, yet fully indexable by Google and other search engines. This can lead to a dilution of ranking potential when you've got the exact same content on multiple URLs. What I've been finding is that some WordPress themes have become so dated that with each new WordPress update, the themes lose key functionality. For example, with the Duncan Dental website the WP Admin section wouldn't properly use process javascript. So tabs and buttons in the admin section just didn't work. We weren't even able to add new images to pages using the “add media” button. Similarly, updates to plugins wouldn't process. In short I was able to activate a newer stock theme and get an export of the database. Then I reactivated the original broken theme so his website wouldn't look strange in the mean time. I worked in a test or staging environment to build the new site and the migration back to the public domain was easy. I've promised the team over at OSTraining.com a tutorial writeup to lay out this process. It's pretty easy even for non-programmers like me! So watch for that tutorial.
Here's a screenshot of the new website. The image links to the actual website if you want to see it live.
