Mission: move a website to WordPress
When starting out as the Greystoke Geek, I was looking to minimise my initial outlay. I grabbed a ‘value’ hosting package from Weebly for just £36 for 2 years, and set off to build a website. It was OK. But it lacked functionality I needed, and I ended up spending a lot of time coding hacks to get it looking vaguely the way I wanted. Even then it looked dated. And after the 2 years were up I knew I was in for a substantial price hike. So I determined to move the website to WordPress, and rebuild, and improve it.
The Solution
I built the new WordPress site on the side. Some of my website urls were changing, so I made sure to set up all the redirects I needed, so that search engines would not return a ‘page not found’ error. My news blog was improved, with comments enabled and social sharing added. A contact form was added, protected by Google ‘recaptcha’ v3. I made sure to use the robust SMTP protocol, rather than the default WordPress php option. Customers can now contact me more easily and submit testimonials online too!
Using the lightweight ‘Generate Press‘ theme, I built a modern, fast, accessible website which is SEO optimised. I also made sure to add a GDPR compliant cookie banner!
When it came to replacing my website with WordPress I simply reconfigured my domain to point to my new servers and the transition was seamless!
The Completed Site
The finished site is robust, and fast, due to careful optimisation, and, of course, good hosting. All the images are optimised, the code is loaded in the most efficient way possible, and I have implemented caching where appropriate so that pages load as quickly as possible.
The Greystoke Geek website showcases just what can be achieved when you choose me to build your website. My attention to every detail is informed by my 20 year IT career with a blue chip financial. That experience is, I believe, unique in Cumbria.
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