While my old website design was still quite decent, it really struggled with flexibility. The more moving parts I tried to include, like a better call-to-action design for my products, a new design for tutorials, or just some performance improvements – almost all of this was kind of hacky due to the theme I was using at that time.

Going All-In on Full-Site-Editing

It was also not block-based, which was kind of a problem if you have watched the last years of WordPress development and its focus on full-site editing. I decided to go all-in, used the FrostWP theme as a starting point, converted all of my pages, blog articles, tutorials, and more to blocks, and started learning the ins and outs of full site editing.

Learning Full-Site-Editing

The first roadblock for me was learning all things full-site editing. What does that even mean? How does it work? I barely worked with React and Block Development besides a few little side projects, I made more for fun than profit.

Then I stumbled upon the course from Fränk Klein called Building Block Themes. I bought the course and started watching it during our three weeks vacation in mid-summer this year. It really dives deep into the topic, and it’s impressive how far you can go without even knowing how to code.

Instead of just watching the course, I used my own website as a practical project and converted it step by step to Full-Site-Editing. Once I learned about repeatable blocks, I added them. Once I learned about patterns, I added them, and so on.

Requirements for the new website

Despite not being flexible enough for my use case, I also had a huge list of things I wanted to improve for the next iteration of my website.

Documentation

This was one of the most important things on my list. I completely rewrote the entire documentation for all of my products. I introduced overview pages and a categorization (plugins and topics) to better structure and manage new documentation articles on my website.

I also worked with Gina, who helps me in all things Content Marketing (Writing tutorials, spellchecking and copy improvements, and so much more).

Changelogs

Another thing I always wanted to implement was a dedicated changelog area on my website. As I now have a couple of pro-only products, the changelog from w.org wasn’t sufficient anymore. Now I have a clean overview page for each product that shows all changes in chronological order – great!

Landing Pages

I really wanted to improve the landing pages for my products. I spend quite a lot of time here improving the copy, the overall structure, and more. I also took the time to create a little showcase video for each product and researched some popular customers to showcase them on the website.

Support Form

I have used Gravity Forms for years, and I still recommend them. However, due to the complexity of my support form, it was no longer an option to use it for my website.

I needed a few things that were just too hard to implement with Gravity Forms, so I built my own little form to handle all of my edge cases. I wouldn’t recommend doing this on your own website, but for me, it was the right decision.

While this form looks quite simple, there is quite a lot going on here:

• conditional display for fields
• Algolia search integration
• integration Freemius license check
• Integration with Helpscout to automatically tag new submissions

And all of that has be done on the client side, as this website runs completely static and not as a usual WordPress website.

Performance

My old website was quite performant. I knew I wanted at least the same performance, if not better, with the relaunch. To my surprise, there wasn’t too much work involved in getting a decent result as Full Site Editing, and Gutenberg is generally quite performant already. Not bad!

Despite being a static website, the only plugin involved here was PerfMatters, which I highly recommend.

Summary

This process took more time than I initially thought, but that was mostly because I had never worked with Full-Site-Editing before, and there was quite a lot of content restructuring and SEO stuff that needed my attention to make sure all redirects were working, the URL structure is optimized, and the page speed is decent.