Another website “rescue” mission, this entailed rebuilding a well-established site that suffered from slow performance, technical glitches, and bit-rot after a series of partially realized theme and host migrations in the past. Other issues included an overly complex taxonomy structure, a labor-intensive ad placement system, and a growing “bounce rate” that was sending traffic growth, though still substantial, in the wrong direction.
After researching and purchasing a highly regarded WordPress “directory site” theme, we set about migrating the data. The crux entailed writing PHP scripts to extract serialized data objects from the old database, reformatting them with Unix text processing tools, and importing them via the new theme’s WP All Import profile. After several false starts, we were able to avoid the onus of manually recreating the site’s thousand-plus listings.
I’ll add that this site was a real pleasure to work on! Throughout the process, I was constantly entertained by the site creators’ fantastic photos and witty, literary style of writing. This was definitely one of my most enjoyable WordPress projects so far!