Let this be a lesson. If you ever want to revive a neglected site – just start again.

WordPress Update

The first hurdle is the incredible change in WordPress and it’s plugins over the last couple of years. WordPress has added functionality (e.g. tags) that was once only available as plugins.

More importantly, as I indicated in my last post, the purpose of this site has changed, and with it the categories and tags.

The good news is that the basic site is now upgraded and working. The purpose is clear, and now enshrined on a brand new About page. The bad news is that there are a lot of old posts and pages that need re-writing – and none of them really worth the effort.

If you need to revitalize an old site, you need to think about upgrading or starting with a brand new install.

It is easy to decide what to do – just look at your visitor logs. You will see one of three possible situations:

1. Very little traffic, or
2. Generally little traffic except for a few pages, or
3. Lots of traffic.

For 1. you should scrap it and start again.
For 2. you should do similar, but save the good pages first then copy them into a new installation.
Though nice to have 3., starting again with a site that is neglected but still getting worthwhile traffic is your nightmare. There are much easier ways to do it than running WordPress upgrades across very old versions. In fact, I have a similar site to update shortly, so I’ll go into more details then.

Website Technical Action Points

• Make sure you leave an hour per month in your technical plans for site maintenance.
• Never leave a site longer than 6 months without updating WordPress core and all plugins and themes.
• If your site needs upgrading and you are not sure how to tackle it, seek advice in the forum.

For avid readers who are waiting for the forum startup information that I promised in the last post, I’m holding this over until I test some new features on a busy forum. If you need some immediate help installing your forum software, just raise the issue in the WordPress plugin forum.