Sally from Heart Yoga contacted looking for help with her existing WordPress website. She’d recently started using a new Theme (Themes’ control how WordPress looks) but was having problems getting the site looking and working how she wanted. The website was also very slow.

Although WordPress makes it easy to switch and start using a new theme, in reality it usually means a lot of work learning how the new theme is set-up and adjusting your content to make sure it still looks good.

The problem is made worse if you’re using a complex theme with lots of built in features. So if you switch themes and the new one doesn’t have the same set of features you end up missing things and having to learn new ways to do things.

Thankfully Sally had backups of the two versions of her website. This meant we could see them side-by-side and Sally could tell me which bits from each version she wanted or needed.

The website was also using a lot of plugins, with some crossover of functionality, where plugins are trying to the same or very similar jobs. This, coupled with some low quality hosting, meant the website was getting very slow.

Sally’s business is still evolving so the website needed to be pretty flexible. I designed a simple theme to use with the Genesis parent theme with just enough controls to suit the new colour scheme supplied. Although the site now uses a custom theme it’s deliberately kept minimal in options, this means that if Sally decides to change themes again it should be a lot easier. By relying more on the features built into WordPress, such as the new Gutenberg editor, means less reliance on the theme, and easier switching.

I replaced any poor quality plugins, and we dropped quite a few that weren’t really adding anything useful to the site. We also placed the new website onto some higher quality hosting.