Client work
psychopenhars.com migration
Moved a WordPress 5.8 site built with a page builder to WordPress 7.1 and a block theme, with no broken links.
The situation
A small practice’s website ran on WordPress 5.8 with the ColibriWP page builder. It was years out of date and its URLs all contained /index.php/. The shared hosting had no mysqldump and possibly no rsync.
The approach
- A new theme: a Twenty Twenty-Five child theme with self-hosted fonts, and the pages rebuilt as block markup kept in the repository.
- Clean permalinks: Apache rules send every legacy
/index.php/...URL to its new address in a single 301, and a script checks each old URL. - Rehearsed migration: one script backs up the site, updates core, installs the theme, applies the content and permalinks, and writes the
.htaccess. It ran first on a local copy of the real production backup. - Safe rollback: database dumps go through
wp eval-file, which works without the usual MySQL tools, and the rollback steps are documented.
Result
The site runs on current WordPress with a maintainable theme, and existing links and search ranking carried over.