Just wrapped up migrating nearly 20 WordPress sites from a customer’s fleet onto our new PressHarbor platform, built on Automattic’s WP Cloud infrastructure.
One thing stood out:
Long-running WordPress sites carry a lot of history. The good and the bad.
One of the things I enjoy seeing during a well-executed migration is that history being preserved.
When a migration is performed using tools like rsync, file modification timestamps can be preserved along with the files themselves. It’s surprisingly satisfying to see an image uploaded in 2014 still showing a 2014 modification date after arriving on the new platform.
But history isn’t just found in file timestamps.
It’s also found in the plugin list.
Many of these sites carried image optimization plugins, CDN plugins, caching plugins, and various performance tools that solved very real problems when they were installed.
Those choices weren’t mistakes. In many cases they were exactly the right solution at the time.
But platforms evolve. WordPress evolves.
Today we’re running on a platform with a built-in CDN, integrated edge caching, image optimization, and dynamic image resizing capabilities that simply weren’t available when many of these sites were first optimized.
It raises an interesting question:
How many of the optimizations on a site are still solving today’s problems, and how many are solving yesterday’s?
Sometimes the best optimization isn’t adding another plugin.
Just wrapped up migrating nearly 20 WordPress sites from a customer’s fleet onto our new PressHarbor platform, built on Automattic’s WP Cloud infrastructure.
One thing stood out:
Long-running WordPress sites carry a lot of history. The good and the bad.
One of the things I enjoy seeing during a well-executed migration is that history being preserved.
When a migration is performed using tools like rsync, file modification timestamps can be preserved along with the files themselves. It’s surprisingly satisfying to see an image uploaded in 2014 still showing a 2014 modification date after arriving on the new platform.
But history isn’t just found in file timestamps.
It’s also found in the plugin list.
Many of these sites carried image optimization plugins, CDN plugins, caching plugins, and various performance tools that solved very real problems when they were installed.
Those choices weren’t mistakes. In many cases they were exactly the right solution at the time.
But platforms evolve. WordPress evolves.
Today we’re running on a platform with a built-in CDN, integrated edge caching, image optimization, and dynamic image resizing capabilities that simply weren’t available when many of these sites were first optimized.
It raises an interesting question:
How many of the optimizations on a site are still solving today’s problems, and how many are solving yesterday’s?
Sometimes the best optimization isn’t adding another plugin.
It’s removing the ones you no longer need.