There are billions of web pages on the Internet that are dead. Some died little by little or were abandoned. Others were born dead. I explain it to you, and I tell you what can be done to revive these sites, with a real practical case.
A zombie or living dead website does not necessarily have to be a site made with WordPress, but hey, as are the 80% Well, we have to talk about them.
The funny thing is that I distinguish 2 main types of "living dead WordPress":
The first, and most obvious, is the site that had some activity and updates to its content, until… Boom! Its writing abandons it, either they close, or they throw away... and for whatever reason, it stays there. It was on a free hosting service, and no one closes it... And there the content remains (sometimes, good content). But there it remains adrift. Sooner or later, they disappear.
They didn't even dare to press "refresh", for fear that everything would "blow up". So I was tasked with a website resurrection.
The second type of WordPress Zombie is the most useless and dangerous at the same time. It is that site, which was delivered turnkey to its owners, and they either They never did ANYTHING with its contents, or they did SOMETHING for a period of time, until they left it there, with its contents or store products as is. The owners continue with their activity in the physical world, and pay for their domain and hosting renewals, but the website is completely Zombie.
Well, I had to deal with one of these recently. Its owner contacted me and explained that he didn't even dare to press "update" for fear that everything would "go wrong." So they ordered me one Resurrection of the website.
Without having entered the backend yet (to see how much it was "fucked up"), what I budgeted for it from the start was a tune-up. This consisted of:
- First of all, create a backup of the database and another backup of the contents (export posts, products, orders...).
- Update everything possible (Nucleo, plugins, themes) and discard everything that is obsolete (deprecated): Everything that cannot be updated, for example, premium or non-premium plugins, whose version is very old or does not have recent updates ( for example, last 6 months).
- Run a malware scanner, to carry out a first cleaning phase and detect very possible spam generators (squatter) that have come to live on the site.
- Perform maintenance on the database (clean transients, drafts, revisions etc) and optimize the tables.
- Install and activate at least a plugin SECURITY and another of PERFORMANCE with their corresponding firewall, cache etc.
- Check users, and possible and probable vulnerabilities in these (that the admin is called "admin", permissions, joke passwords, etc.)
In short, do a “tune-up”. Since we were there, to seduce Google again, I proposed creating a blog (the site had only pages and a store) with 3 thematic posts (With ChatGPT for drafts and documentation, and a little writing work you can make good articles in an afternoon ). In this way, once the setup is finished, we could ask search engines to reindex the site, so that "they can see that he is alive again."
Obviously, what I found when I got to work was worse (although not the worst I have seen).
The site, an ecommerce sale of specialty coffees and teas, basically they were a couple of pretty pretty landing pages and the store. More or less standard, it had a builder, WP Bakery, and a cool premium Envato theme, its WooCommerce and some addons, but everything was pretty basic.
They had a spambot that generated fake users and posts with stupid content and products, such as sunglasses, viagra, dates, etc.
The first thing I saw was that there were posts and quite a few users. On a site without a blog. Hmmm I look at the posts… and they are all SPAM. Come on, the site was infected, a spambot had entered, and had generated users and posts.
It is easy to detect them, especially on a site that is in Spanish and those posts are all in English. You can also imagine the themes: Recommendations for cool products, sunglasses, viagra, dates, etc.
In these cases, and I say this from experience, you have to evaluate the damage caused, because it will take less work, migrate “non-spam” content to a fresh, new WordPress installation, you have to clean it all up using malware cleaners and cleaning scripts.
Why do I say this? Because the zombie infection is so strong that it is likely that “remains” will remain after cleaning. It is better to save the parts of your brain that still function, and transplant it into a brand new cloned human body.
So this is what I did: I exported all the “good” content (pages, actual store users, products, theme) and put it into a fresh, new installation of WP.
Afterwards, I updated everything possible. The theme was already obsolete. There was nothing broken on the front end, but... WooCommerce's notices about store templates being overwritten in the theme clearly said that That theme was more than 4 years old.
This ruined my plans to create a child theme of the theme and put my four patches and fixes there. That theme is a danger, and the store or the Checkout process may not work correctly.
This, more than a problem, was an opportunity. Changing the theme for an official theme compatible with WooCommerce, in this case, StoreFront, was the ideal solution, since not only do you gain compatibility, but you can also get rid of the builder (WP Bakery).
But wow... What's up with these cool landing pages made with the builder? Well, I found a great plugin for the block editor, which in addition to giving it some power-ups, allowed me to convert content from WP Bakery to Gutenberg (TOTAL!)
For me Storefront, is the perfect theme for a WordPress WooCommerce store, at least to start from scratch and customize, it is free, it is official, it has updates... It is true that it is not a "block theme", but you can easily customize the template parts, and then let your client use blocks on pages and posts.
Converting pages from Bakery to Blocks worked, and although it wasn't perfect, it saved me a lot of work. I only had to recover some styles and colors, but in no time I had the header, footer, typography and measurements of "containers", etc., traced to the other theme.
The next thing I had to review was… the content. Apart from the landing pages, everything else was poor. Poor titles, products without description, bare category names also without descriptions... In fact, I had not installed any SEO management plugin. I put The Seo Framework on them, and I started to fix all the MINIMUM problems (Titles and meta descriptions that were missing from the main landing pages and products). Of course, there wasn't a single photo that had ALT text. There are plugins out there that, if an image does not have its alt, use the file name as a buffer. It's provisionally okay, but come on, what better "photo of a dog" than "IMG_XXXX" which is what usually happens...
Then, well, I made the blog. I created the 3 posts, and then I did a little layout of the appearance of the single and the index (post page). To link, I added "blog" to the menus, and before the footer, on the home page, I added a "Recent Posts" block with these 3 initial posts.
I asked the search engines to reindex and voila. A WordPress that comes back to life. Until it returns to its previous state, of course, hehe.
This is... what always happens with many sites delivered "turnkey"
Both in sites that I have set up for clients from an agency (some of which are high-cost), and in sites that have been set up for the owner by "the brother-in-law" or "a friend who makes websites", I have always encountered the typical case of, once the site has been delivered "turnkey" and after some basic explanations or introduction on "how do I change the texts or add products"... Its owners see that managing a website is much more complex than using Wallapop.
Although content management is becoming easier and more visual, it requires minimal training and knowledge ("what is a url", "what is the alt of an image", "why can't I copy and paste things from another website?" ) that unfortunately, in reality, almost no one outside the sector has access.
And as; They do the basics for a while... and end up dropping the subject. So next time, if they ask you for help, I hope you find this case study helpful.
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