My Website Can VoteThe Challenges of Maintaining a 20-year-old Website

20 frickin’ years

December 1996

December 1996

6 months

2 years

3 years

3 years

3 years

3 years

4 years

4.5 years

Meanwhile…

5 years

5 years

5 years

Fast forward 14 years…

19 years

So what to do?

Pros• Security - better than what I had

• PHP-based

• Responsive themes

• Plugins!

• Better admin UX - including ACL & versioning

• Less friction to update

Cons• Security - WordPress is a big target

• Learning curve

• Migration effort

• Ego - would using WordPress make me look like a n00b?

Concerns• How to organise the site? How much of the

cross-referencing to automate?

“This has to be a solved problem, right?”

• 20 years of inbound links and PageRank to preserve

• Hard-coded HTML styles in the DB to clean up

The Plan• Set up site on new host

• Create basic site structure

• Read up on security

• VaultPress & Wordfence

• Auto-updates

• Set up child theme and create nav menu

• Start migrating content

Migration• Start with simplest pages and sections first

• Write functions where needed

• Required some plugins:

• Advanced Custom Fields

• Add Categories to Pages

• WP Gallery Custom Links…

More Plugins• Breadcrumbs -> Breadcrumb NavXT plugin

• Calendar -> My Calendar plugin

• Trivia Quizzes -> Riddle (+ plugin)

• Polls -> WP-Polls plugin

• Search -> Relevanssi plugin

• Timeline -> ???

Final Steps• Migrate all old news/blog posts

• Set up Adsense and Analytics

• Update the theme

• Set up .htaccess redirects

• Change DNS to point to the new site!

Some numbers…• ~4500 page views/day

• 28% US; 25% UK; 6% AU

• 60% desktop;27% mobile; 13% tablet

• 84% via search;11% direct; 4% referral; < 1% social

• Most popular content: short stories; trivia quizzes; teacher materials

What’s Next• Set up SSL

• Mop up broken links

• Add new content

• Update design once illustrations are finished

• Keep an eye on stats & revenue

Thanks!

@web_goddess

Kris Howard

@RoaldDahlFans

http://www.roalddahlfans.com