Bringing a legacy WordPress website into the present
Rebuilding an ageing WordPress website into a modern, maintainable platform while preserving years of existing content and giving the team a simpler way to manage what comes next.
The Challenge
Women Empowered had an established WordPress website containing years of content, including an extensive archive of articles.
The website, however, was built on an ageing WordPress setup and relied on WPBakery for its page layouts. Updating and extending it had become increasingly difficult, while the structure no longer reflected how the organisation wanted to manage and present its content.
The challenge wasn't simply to replace an old design. It was to modernise the website without losing the content that was still valuable, while creating a better foundation for future updates.
The Approach
Rather than treating the existing website as something to discard, I separated what needed to be preserved from what needed to be rebuilt.
Existing articles could remain as WordPress posts, while the main pages could be rebuilt using a modern layout system.
I also looked at content that deserved more structure. Events, for example, shouldn't have to be manually placed and removed from pages as dates change. They could exist as structured content that WordPress understands and displays automatically.
The goal was to make the website easier to maintain not just by changing how it looked, but through structured WordPress development that improved how the content behind it worked.
The Solution
A modern WordPress rebuild
The main website was rebuilt with Divi 5, replacing the legacy WPBakery layouts with a cleaner and more maintainable page-building environment.
This provided a new foundation for the website while allowing the existing article archive to remain part of the rebuilt site.
Structured event management
I created a dedicated event content system using a custom post type, event categories and custom fields for structured event information, rather than treating events as ordinary pages.
Events have their own structured information, including event dates and categories, allowing WordPress to distinguish upcoming events from past ones and display the relevant content automatically.
This means the team can concentrate on adding and updating an event rather than manually maintaining every place where that event appears.
Reusable, dynamic content
Where information needs to appear in multiple places, the website uses reusable and dynamically generated content rather than duplicating it across individual pages.
This reduces repetitive editing and helps keep information consistent as the website grows.
The Result
Women Empowered now has a website that preserves the value of its existing content while removing much of the legacy structure that made the old site difficult to evolve.
Pages can be managed through a modern editing environment, existing articles remain available, and structured content such as events can update the website dynamically.
The result isn't simply a newer-looking website. It's a WordPress setup designed to be easier to manage, extend and maintain over time.
