I just took over a ten-year-old wordpress site for a very small company that is under new management. The site was previously managed by “some guy” who setup a table at an industry event and handed out his business card to everyone (which turned out to be a great idea for him).
The company is a small veterinary clinic. Their site offers info on their services, and users can fill out and submit certain forms, and can self-schedule telephone appointments. Existing clients can also request medicine refills and can order a variety of supplements.
The site has a ton of plugins, and dozens of pages that are obsolete with incorrect information. Many of the plugins are not updated.
The new owner wants the site updated, but what is needed is an entire new site. They will need a new logo and new brand. They have changed many of the services they offer. Almost everything is different, but the core services are the same. They are also one of the few veterinary clinics in the area that specializes in a specific type of treatment.
I do not really expect to get any pushback from the client on my recommendation, but I am not really excited to start working on this project. It is a big undertaking, in my opinion, simply because of the volume of information from the previous owner, who knew nothing about having a web presence, and insisted on constantly adding new pages on a whim.
I guess my question is how to start. I am thinking about making minimal repairs and corrections to the existing site while simultaneously creating a new site on the same space (in a different folder), and keeping it hidden until it is usable, and then switching completely to the new site.
The new site would be a new install of wordpress in a different folder on the same server, and when it is ready I would just point the domain name to the new folder. Are there any issues with doing this?
Thanks…and sorry for the long post.
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No issues. I wouldn’t spend too much time on the old site or zhushing it up. I would get started on creating a new install and copying the content over, then building the pages again from scratch. I advise copying the site over so you don’t have to migrate all their content which according to your post, seems to be a lot. You can easily turn things off and delete things as you go. Starting from a fresh install is usually going to take more time than it will if you start from a baseline.
Instead of directing the domain to a folder I would simply stick a holding page up with a message that something new is coming and some contact details.
Then develop a new site offline using local.wp and when you’re ready, install a new Instance of WP and import the local site to production.
I’m not a fan of sub folders, SEO works better when things are configured at the root and it makes overall management easier if it’s all just under public_html.
Remember a cert, security and make sure to follow best practices. Don’t deploy WordPress too soon with no security as it’s very likely the site will be found by a bot and compromised.
It all depends on what the client wants and what you’re looking at under the hood. If they just want you to fix up/maintain the current site then you have to work with what you have and charge them by the hour. If you get the green light to rebuild, I would just pull the current site into a local wp install and start from there. You can edit their current site but if you are going to build them a new one I wouldn’t go past patching security issues on their live site and closely studying which plugins are actually needed.