So I inherited a poorly maintained Wordpress site with a heavily hacked DIVI theme, and it’s time to pick a better theme – and especially more modern design/UX.
The pages are a mess, the database is a mess, the media library is a mess, the CSS is insane. While experienced in frameworks and custom HTML/CSS, my Wordpress experience is composed mostly of swearing.
What is the best practice for preserving the blog post history, structure and content while trashing everything else and starting over with a new theme and pages/IA? Is this possible?
I am new to Wordpress but see an export option in Tools.
I would start a new install locally and set everything up as you want it with the new template.
Export your blog posts and import them into you local setup.
When your local setup is working delete the current site, and upload the one you have locally.
You can use a plugin called duplicator that might be helpful.
That’s been considered, however it appears that linked media files are not part of the posts export. A large percentage of the blog posts use more than one image.
I perhaps a plugin of some type that could purge the media library of all images not linked by content in the db. That and a posts export might get me half-way there.
Sometimes there is nothing readily available for what you want to do. There is nothing to stop you writing your own datatabase queries to modify the Wordpress data yourself.
