When you visited DomainInvesting.com this morning, you may have noticed that the website looks a bit different. I relaunched a revamped website very early this morning, and while the look and feel is very similar to what it has been for several years, the back-end has been totally reconstructed.
Several years ago when I rebranded and redesigned DomainInvesting.com, the website’s heavily customized WordPress theme was overhauled. This allowed me to design the site the way I wanted, but it also made it more challenging to update WordPress and various plugins without causing problems.
In addition to the redesign and rebrand, I also migrated my hosting to GoDaddy. The website was set up on a server using one of the older WordPress hosting plans that is no longer offered by GoDaddy. As with most technological things (like an iPhone or laptop), it was great until the back end of my site essentially became obsolete.
For the past year or so, the site operated on a version of PHP that is no longer updated or supported. When something stopped working or broke, the team at GoDaddy (led by Spike) worked to patch it as best as they could. Because of the dated and heavily customized theme I had been using, it was not easy to make changes that didn’t impact or break other parts of the website. Additionally, some functions would not work on the newer versions of PHP. As you may have seen in July, when I updated an essential plugin, the site went down for almost a day and I needed to use a backup to restore the website. Despite the fact that my site has been operating a very outdated back-end, the site managed to have almost no downtime, which I credit to GoDaddy’s assistance.
With an outdated theme, several older plugins that couldn’t be updated, and an unsupported PHP version, it became necessary to totally reconstruct the back-end.
For this project, I engaged
