Last month I heard some words no business owner wants to hear- or any person, honestly.
‘You may have a little time left with it.’ Those were the words the tech support agent told me about our website.
I remember the date clearly, March 24, 2021. It is the official date of death of the old swagher site.
We’d had it since about 2012 or 2014, and things had been fine for years.
We lost 5,000 blogs in 2018 when we paid someone to update the theme, and they instead built a new site, but it was somehow the same site.
Then suddenly, in February, we began to have issues. It started with little things and reaching out to tech support every week, Monday, to be exact. Every Monday, our site would go down. Then I began reaching out more frequently, and finally daily.
No one could tell me what was wrong. I finally called in one day for support instead of using the chat, and an agent broke it down to me. My site was dying. The PHP was too old to continue updating, which meant our plugins (think bells and whistles added on) would not be compatible with the site itself.
The old me would’ve cried, but my medication doesn’t allow me to feel things other than fear as profoundly. So I tried to keep the tech on the phone as long as I could to collect more information and see my options.
Unfortunately, after more troubleshooting and talking, we discovered that my site was already dead. It explained why we hadn’t been able to publish anything else on it for days by that time.
We just didn’t know.
The thought of building a new site was scary. I have designed websites before, but we currently had 1,500 blogs on our old site. I didn’t know how we would move them all. I didn’t want to leave anyone’s feature or story out.
I couldn’t cry, but I desperately wanted to. I was in the middle of an issue and travel books layout and training our new interns. It was the only thing that made sense to me, but I realized what made more sense was to get started on the new site.
Luckily, I got all of the steps I would need to take, except one, from the agent. It took me about five days to get the new site up and running with the old content imported. The site migration was the most challenging part because you have to wait days for everything to populate.
I hated it because you also don’t know if you did everything correctly or not. The back and forth checking in went on for weeks.
But finally, here we are with our new site.
We invite you to check it out and show it some love since it’s still a baby. We just hit 500 views over the weekend.
So that is what has been going on behind the scenes with us. What’s good with you all?
