A freelance gig where the unfortunate folks at [REDACTED] had engaged an external contractor to complete a website for them. Resulting in, dare I say, around 20 pages of absolute slop stuffed unceremoniously into a WordPress template.

Whether it was the 3 different Contact Us pages, each linked to by a different button on the homepage, or the 3000 word homepage itself, this thing was going to be a big job.

Less is more

This was going to be a tutorial in removing as much stuff as I could, without having to rewrite the entire website myself. All the actual content appeared copy-pasted, AI-Optimized for SEO, and written in another language then converted to English, then converted back and forth another few times. This would have to be re-written by an actual human, shame it had to be me.

Given that this is a construction company, the website should have plenty of images displaying the great work done by the team. Perhaps some before and after comparison photos. Perhaps they should group the photos by each project done. Unfortunately this was not the case. The homepage was filled with what I could only describe as before photos.

Wrapping my head around a custom WordPress template written in PHP and obfuscated seemingly intentionally in a plugin called WP File Manager made it near impossible to wrap my head around where to start (not to mention the huge security risk). Trying to read all of these PHP files made me desperately miss my darling React and TailwindCSS.

I detest how static and rigid the entire idea of plugins is. Having to call some random function in PHP and just hope it works in production. That's another thing I forgot to mention. NO BETA ENVIRONMENT??? So yeah my changes and fixes were getting thrown straight into production, for better or for worse. Fortunately this was not a much-travelled-to site, or it would have 404'ed with a default WordPress error once or twice.

I'm not completely done yet, but there is a lot of red tape around all the changes I'd like to make. I will probably raise my prices for this kind of work in the future, because it is truly menial.