Right, phase two of reshaping the website is underway.
First job done: I’ve turned off the old blog style I had on there and de-forced it back to a normal blog. I’m not a massive fan of the “WordPress til 2025” type theme that comes out of the box, so the plan now is to install a theme called Astra and see where that takes me.
While I was at it I went through all the plugins I had installed and disabled a load of them. I’m down to about six now, which has already made the site noticeably faster. I haven’t done any proper optimisations yet so that’s a nice little win for free.
The two jobs in front of me
There are two main tasks lined up.
The first is making the site look better with a new theme. The second is deleting all the old blog posts that aren’t relevant anymore. I’ll keep a couple of the ones that still pull in decent traffic but the rest need to go.
Before I start mass deleting though, I need to talk about 301 redirects.
Why 301 redirects matter
If you’re not familiar with 301s, they’re search engine friendly redirects. If someone has linked to one of my posts from another site, then I delete that post, anyone clicking the link is going to land on a 404 page not found. That’s not great for the user and it’s not great for Google either.
A 301 permanent redirect tells the search engines that the content has moved and points them to a new version or to whatever the most relevant page is now. So before any deleting happens, I’m mapping out the redirects.
Switching from Beaver Builder to Elementor
My normal go-to page builder is Beaver Builder. It’s solid, it’s quick, I know it inside out. But Elementor gives a bit more style freedom and I haven’t touched it properly in a while, so part of this project is about pushing my own boundaries and getting back up to speed with it.
So Astra Pro is installed, Elementor Pro is installed, and I’m building a brand new homepage from scratch. Nothing groundbreaking. The whole point of this project is that I’m not going to get bogged down in design. Something simple to start with, then iterate.
Trying the AI website builder
Astra has an AI website builder built in which uses ZIP WP under the hood, so I thought I’d have a play with it. Always a slight risk that something like this is going to break the existing site though, so first things first: back up.
Quick reminder if you run a WordPress site yourself: always back up before you mess around. Make sure you back up both the files and the database. Some tools only do one or the other so it pays to check. We have rolling backups on all of our sites which makes life easier, but for one-off changes like this I still kick off a fresh backup first.
With that done I pointed the builder at a SaaS style brief because I wanted something a bit modern, picked a layout that felt close to the Ready Steady Websites look, and let it run.
What ZIP WP actually did
End result: it created a new homepage with a bunch of sections on it. For a minute I thought it had killed my blog, but no, all the posts are still there. Looks like it just replaced what was on the homepage which is exactly what I wanted.
Quick poke around in Elementor to see how the grid was put together. As suspected, it’s not a proper grid. That’s fine for now but worth knowing when I start tweaking.
One handy thing about how I’ve set this up: my holding page is sitting in a static folder on the server. So while I’m fiddling about with WordPress on the back end, visitors still see the holding page out front. That means I can break things on the WordPress side without anyone noticing. Highly recommend that approach if you’re rebuilding a live site.
The fiddly bits
The contact page is empty and a few of the auto-generated blocks are not great. “Digital pioneer” is one phrase I’m going to fix very quickly.
I also had a moment of missing Beaver Builder. In Beaver, if you want to drop from a two column row down to a single column, you just delete the column and it reflows. In Elementor it seems to be a bit more manual. Set the width to 100, drag things around, centre stuff up. Got there in the end but it took longer than it should have.
That’s the kind of friction I expected though. The whole point is to get fluent with this builder again rather than reach for the familiar one every time.
Where I’m leaving it
The homepage is roughly in shape. It’s looking better than it was. The other pages are still a mess but I’ve got a working starting point. Next up I’ll test it on mobile, then come back to the redirects and the old blog clear-out.
Not bad for a phase two session. Join me next time and I’ll pick this up from where I’ve left it. If anything in this is useful for your own site, or you want to chat through how any of it works, give me a shout.