OrthoEducation
See Case Study
Nine sites running on one WordPress multisite install, cloned by the previous vendor and then neglected. When I took it over it had abandoned page builders, five different backup plugins, and a database so large the host had started throttling writes to it.
What I did
- Ran a five-phase cleanup over six weeks. Database from 2.1 GB to 166 MB, files from 5.5 GB to 2.8 GB, active plugins from 37 to 19.
- Dropped about 275 database tables left behind by plugins nobody had used in years. Every one was checked for live references before deletion.
- Re-screenshotted 27 key pages after each phase with a script I wrote, so anything that broke would show up immediately. Nothing did.
- Closed a publicly readable error log that was leaking an email API key. Removed the vendor’s admin accounts and reassigned 3,800+ posts to the owner.
- Wrote a plugin that gives the whole network one sitemap and one search box, covering all nine sites plus the client’s sister site. It’s still running in production.
- Set up email, security headers, malware scanning, and nightly off-server backups across all nine sites.
- Built a Pinecone knowledge base feeding an AI chat assistant, drawing on content from the entire network plus FootEducation.
Result
Google search impressions rose 33x over the following year as the cleanup and indexing settled. The editors never noticed any of it happening.