More Than A Year, One Ruined Site, And Why I Started Again From Scratch

I already wrote about the early chaos of starting a WordPress site, the broken layouts, the plugin overload, the mobile surprise that nobody warns you about. This isn’t that post either. This is the part before that, the actual reason I ended up starting completely fresh on a new domain instead of just fixing what I already had.

The site before this one was called digitalpromarketing. It started on a builder, the simple drag-and-drop kind, and for a while that was genuinely fine. I wasn’t trying to do anything complicated, and the builder didn’t get in the way of that.

At some point I decided I’d outgrown it. I wanted more control than a builder gives you, so I moved the whole thing over to WordPress myself. That decision wasn’t the mistake. Doing it without really knowing what I was doing was.

I broke it. Not in one dramatic moment, more in the way things break when you’re clicking around a system you don’t fully understand, changing settings, undoing things badly, layering fixes on top of half-fixes. By the time I stepped back and looked at what I’d actually done to the site, it wasn’t a builder site anymore and it wasn’t a working WordPress site either. It was somewhere in between, and neither half of it worked properly.

I didn’t fix it. I got busy, and busy turned into over a year of just not touching it.

There’s a particular kind of embarrassing that comes with this being my actual job. I fix other people’s websites for a living, broken tracking, slow load times, conversion paths that leak visitors, and I handle other businesses’ social media too, knowing exactly what I’m doing the whole time. And through all of that, my own site sat there half-broken, and my own social presence sat there basically silent. It’s the carpenter with a door at home that’s been hanging off one hinge for a year, perfectly capable of fixing it in twenty minutes, just never quite gets around to fixing his own.

If you’re wondering whether jumping from a builder to WordPress is even worth it, I’ve actually got both running live right now and put them side by side properly: Website Builder vs WordPress: I’m Running Both Right Now. Real traffic numbers, real speed tests, no theory.

That’s the part I don’t love admitting, but it’s the honest version. Life got in the way, work got in the way, and a broken website that needed real, focused attention to untangle kept losing out to everything else that felt more urgent in the moment, including other people’s websites and other people’s social media, ironically enough. Digitalpromarketing just sat there, neglected, for well over twelve months. Not deleted, not actively failing, just quietly ignored while I told myself I’d get back to it eventually.

Eventually I did come back to it, mentally at least, and had to make an actual decision. Option one was trying to properly untangle a year-old mess I only half remembered the details of. Option two was starting again, on a new domain, doing it properly from day one instead of patching over a year of accumulated damage.

I picked option two. That’s griffithpromarketing.com, and it’s genuinely a fresh start, not a resurrection of the old site wearing a new name. This time I set it up on WordPress through Hostinger from the very beginning, rather than starting on a builder and converting later, and I’ve been documenting the actual process as it happens rather than waiting until it’s polished enough to write about after the fact.

The honest reason I’m telling this story at all, rather than just quietly starting over and pretending digitalpromarketing never happened, is that I think the neglect and the mess are more useful to someone reading this than a clean success story would be. If you’ve got a site sitting somewhere half-broken because you moved platforms without really knowing what you were doing, or a project you’ve been meaning to get back to for longer than you’d like to admit, that’s an extremely normal place to be. It’s not a sign you’re bad at this. It’s just what happens sometimes.

What I’d actually tell someone in that exact spot: be honest with yourself about whether you’re going to fix the old thing or whether you’re just going to keep meaning to. If the honest answer is you’re not going back to it, starting clean isn’t giving up, it’s just choosing to spend your effort somewhere it’ll actually go somewhere.

For griffithpromarketing.com itself, I built it on WordPress through Hostinger from the start, no builder-to-WordPress conversion this time, and it’s been the one constant while everything else about the site’s grown around it. I’m actually in the process of moving it to Cloudways now, not because Hostinger’s been bad, more because the site’s outgrown what a shared hosting plan is built for. I’m documenting that whole migration, and the rest of this restart, properly on the website experiment page as it happens. If you’re starting completely from scratch yourself, WordPress.com is a reasonable place to begin.

Dewi