Foundation Web Design & Development is excited to announce the launch of a new site for Groveland Gecko, a NH-based gecko breeder and supplies provider.
Groveland Gecko came to me a few months ago with a few different issues. The first and immediate need was the dreaded bad host issue. Bluehost, per the usual (that I’ve seen anyway), was causing the client’s site to crash repeatedly. Even just going in to edit a small thing caused the site database server to crash and then not come back up for upwards of three hours at a time.
Besides just being on a bad, slow host, there was also the issue of database bloat. The client already knew that the database was not in an ideal way, and I suspected this was part of the reason why the database server kept crashing. The database was a massive size — around 2 GB — loaded with logs from a couple of different plugins, some left over stuff, and then information about items that should have been happening but weren’t (Failed cronjobs and the like). Taking a backup was impossible — even just accessing phpMyAdmin would sometimes cause the database server to crash. But with some luck and a lot of perseverance (and time) I was able to slowly (and carefully) clean up the database enough that it was moveable.
Once we got off of Bluehost onto the new hoster, the sails on the ship were flying! There were no more crashes of the database server, which allowed the client to actually edit their site for the first time in a long time. There was some site slowness related to plugins sending requests that were not compatible with PHP 8+, but we already knew we were going to address that in a site rebuild.
The Actual Build
What was really exciting about this build was seeing it go from an outdated, take-it-or-leave-it site to something more modern and fun with really only a few changes. We got to reorganize the category offerings and include a few mega menus to keep everything nice and tidy, keeping the content that matters most above the fold. Plus, I got to utilize some of the really cute gecko pictures already loaded on the site and highlight them.
Overall, I love how Groveland Gecko came out and think it’s a massive improvement over the site before! We were able to reduce page load time, reduce CLS down to almost nothing, prevent the site from repeatedly crashing, reduce plugin usage and dependence, install a backup solution, and so much more with this new build. Definitely check out the Groveland Gecko website and consider keeping geckos as your next hobby!