Recently, most of my projects have been focusing on the same concept: take an existing WordPress site (along with all of its content) and update the theme with a modern, mobile friendly one. On the outside, it’s kind of like repainting the house. But it’s also tuning up the furnace, replacing all the lights with LEDs, changing the locks for security, and making sure everyone’s invited to after-remodeling party.

For The Southeast Examiner, it was the same thing with a second directive: migrate the site from the current hosting company because they were overcharging and underserving. We moved the hosting to GreenGeeks and set up a staging site. This preserved the live site and gave us a sandbox to work in while flipping the theme. That same staging site is now being used for testing all of the updates – way safer than updating and reverting if (when) something breaks.