Rebuild and Reinstall Weekend
In our experience when you’ve got a popular site running on WordPress it’s possible for it to start crumbling unless you pay careful attention to it.
In our old way of working we simply installed websites, but did not put any ongoing maintenance agreements in place. Any future needs were done somewhat casually.
Now we’ve had a casualty of that way of working that strengthens and justifies our new method. A client’s blog is crumbling and we now need to take action.
- Introduce Subversion Control (SVN) to allow rollbacks and deployments to development, staging and production environments. Tighter control of the WordPress code.
- Introduce files to a Content Distribution Network (CDN) to seperate content files (images, pictures, stylesheets, etc) and scripts, which in turn improves page loading time and reduces strain on the server.
- Replace the current backup regime with our new methods, which we’re not sharing as they’re commercially sensitive and need to be kept secure.
- Introduce automated alerting of future problems by performing regular ‘heartbeat’ checks on the site.
We’re also going to refine the code and make things a bit slicker. Once complete the client will be part of “Roused” and say goodbye to the “Rouse Media” way of working.
To get to the new nirvana we’re going to rebuild the WordPress installation from scratch - using latest methods and cloud deployment techniques. Once that’s done we’ll port the template, images and audio files over. Lastly, we’ll drop in the database of content after scanning it for problems.
