Super lucky to be working with previous client David again, re-designing his Paper Indulgence HTML/CSS website – first design in 2004 with “Net Objects Fusion 7 for windows” from a cd he got on a PC magazine!!
Was super clean simple table-based code:
so I had to make sure his new site loaded just as fast! I had been playing around with GeneratePress premium and Elementor free, making sure I could design a super easy to use website that he would feel comfortable updating himself with a familiar but much more futuristic feeling/feature-packed interface.
The redesign gave David a chance to completely restyle the layout, look and feel, and wording:
I built the site in a sub-folder and tested it on GTmetrix before migration (1.3s – fastest ever!):
The hosting company is NetRegistry. Before the redesign I advised against staying with them but the hosting had just been renewed. The first migration failed and when I asked for tech support – they had none to offer! They couldnt tell me what had happened and tried to charge $150 for the previous days backup!!! They were still on the no-longer-supported php 5.6 so I thought updating to php7 might have remedied the situation – but did not.
Because the site was built in a sub-folder I copied all the wordpress install to the public_html folder, the old site into a folder named ‘old-website’ and added the two lines of code:
define('WP_HOME','http://example.com');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://example.com');
just above ‘That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging’ as advised by wp-beginner so I could log in to wordpress in its new folder.
For my second attempt I repeated the copying, the .htaccess addition and tried the velvet blues plugin to replace all the old link references. This didnt work and made the site seem more broken…? My third attempt was copying the files to the root folder, adding the lines to the .htaccess file and then once logged in using all in one wp migration plugin; this worked perfectly! (I had first made a backup of the staging website before logging into the migrated site – please see their videos on exporting and importing.)
I then retested the page-speed with GTmetrix resulting in 1.1s!!!!
I used navmenu-addon-for-elementor, and header-footer-elementor in addition to elementor the page builder and generate press premium with tablepress for the pricing tables, wp-fastest-cache/, yoast SEO, simple-facebook-open-graph-tags for sharing on facebook, contact form 7 for the contact page and order/inquiry forms incorporating contact-form-7-honeypot due to David getting a load of spammy contact forms with in a few days of the site going live…
I also did most of the product photography for the new site:
Paper Indulgence is a business based in West Brunswick catering for all your paper cylinders, testamur, graduation, cylinders, specialty papers, origami paper, parchments, scrolls, scroll rods, scroll parts and much more. You can check them out at 471 Victoria St West Brunswick.