A plumbing contractor replaces a website that kept going down

True Blue Plumbing’s website had been edited repeatedly in production, with no staging environment and no version control, and had become unreliable as a result. By early 2024 the domain no longer answered consistently: depending on when you asked, it returned either the live site or an empty WordPress installation on a different host.

No internal technical staff, and no one on the business side able to describe what the site was supposed to do. Hosting and registrar credentials had to be located and recovered before anything could be changed at all. The work had to fit around a plumbing business that could not pause.

The domain was resolving to more than one host. The real site sat on WordPress.com behind a page builder, with a homepage that shipped 438 KB of HTML and no caching layer in front of it. Nothing about the setup could be changed safely, because there was nowhere to test a change before it went live.

The engagement ran through the office managers, the people who knew how the phone actually got answered, and who could make a decision stick. Discovery went far enough that the proposal described the finished site rather than a direction, which meant sign-off had nothing left to resolve.

The replacement was built locally and in full before any of it touched the live domain. That turned launch into a DNS change rather than a migration performed in production on a site that was already fragile.

A clean WordPress build on Flywheel managed hosting, with page caching enabled at the host. DNS was corrected at the registrar so the domain resolved to one place. Page-builder markup gave way to a purpose-built theme, with Autoptimize handling CSS and JavaScript.

Rebuilt rather than repaired. The existing site could have been cleaned up in place, but there was no way to verify a fix on a system with no staging, and the page-builder markup was most of the weight. Starting fresh cost more up front and removed the whole class of problem.

Chose managed hosting over the cheapest available. It is a recurring cost the client had not been paying before, and it is the reason a small business with no technical staff could keep a working site without anyone on hand to maintain it.

The site ran unchanged on that setup until the business closed in 2025.