Behind the scenes: moving half my site off the apex

I opened my own homepage midweek and felt the same mild embarrassment you get when a guest walks into a room you meant to tidy before they arrived. Themes were still hanging around like they lived here. Plugins too. A pile of free resources. Tools. SEO pages that belonged to a different business. Columns that belonged to a writing site. Training that already had somewhere better to go. The apex was still trying to be the whole workshop, the storefront, the magazine, and the classroom, and a visitor in the first ten seconds could be forgiven for not knowing which door was the front door.

So I spent the week moving furniture. Not redesigning for the sake of it. Emptying rooms so the ones that stay can tell the truth.

If the first screen cannot say what you want to be hired for, the rest of the site is arguing with itself.

The week in short:

Themes, plugins, resources, and tools left the apex for their own hubs, with 301s from the old paths.
Newsletters got a home at newsletters.thisismyurl.com.
thisismyurl.com itself moved off WordPress on WP Engine onto flat HTML on Cloudflare Pages, built with Astro.
EdTech stayed on the apex; SEO and web went to Lakeview Brands, training to Lakeview Training, columns to Shipped Words.
A smart 404 started recommending real pages via /api/suggest, and a design and SEO pass cleaned codeblock bugs and internal 301 hops.

The surplus got its own addresses

For years the free stuff lived inside thisismyurl.com like leftovers in a fridge you keep meaning to sort. People who wanted a theme had to dig past training and case studies. People who wanted a case study had to walk past a theme catalog. None of that was malicious. It was accretion. You ship something useful, you leave it where it landed, and five years later your homepage still smells like every project you ever finished.

This week the surplus left. Themes live at themes.thisismyurl.com. Plugins at plugins.thisismyurl.com. Resources at resources.thisismyurl.com. Tools at tools.thisismyurl.com. The old apex paths 301 over, so bookmarks and search results do not die in a ditch. I am not pretending the move was poetic. It was a bunch of redirects and a decision to stop making the front door do four jobs.

Same idea for the newsletter. Capture can still happen on-site, but the lifecycle and the hub sit at newsletters.thisismyurl.com. One place that admits what it is.

WordPress Engine out, flat files in

While I was moving rooms I also moved the house. The apex left WordPress on WP Engine and landed as flat HTML on Cloudflare Pages, generated with Astro. That sentence is shorter than the work. Exports, redirects, content collections, the quiet fear that some old /posts/ URL still thinks it is the canonical one. I will not dress it up as a platform war. WordPress still pays a lot of my bills and still runs plenty of client work. For this site, the one that has to stay sharp about what I teach and build in EdTech, a static apex is simpler to own. Deploy is a build and an upload. The database is no longer the thing that has to wake up so someone can read a guide.

If you have been through a migration like that, you already know the feeling: the public pages look fine on day one, and the real week is chasing the paths that still point at the old furniture.

One job for the apex

The offloads only make sense if something stays. What stays is EdTech and AI for learning: LMS work, curriculum, accessibility, publishers, speaking, the guides. Everything that was pretending to be a second business got a clearer home.

SEO and web design product work points at Lakeview Brands. Training points at Lakeview Training. I already wrote about the training move and a Cloudflare redirect that sat in the dashboard looking useful while doing nothing, in this week's other Behind the Scenes. Columns did not get deleted. They got archived in the repo and pointed at shippedwords.com, which is where writing of that shape belongs. Archive, not erase. Erase is how you lose the thing you need six months later and then swear you never had it.

Archive, not erase. Erase is how you lose the thing you need six months later and then swear you never had it.

That is the transferable bit, if you want one. A site that tries to sell every chapter of your career at once ends up selling none of them clearly. Move the surplus to an address that matches the job. Keep the history somewhere you can still open. Let the homepage mean one thing a stranger can say back to you after one scroll.

A 404 that bothers to help

While the map was changing I also stopped treating missing pages like a shrug. A wrong URL still returns a real 404. The page then asks /api/suggest for a short list of on-site recommendations drawn from a build-time index, not invented URLs, not a soft homepage disguise. Typo in a service path, old bookmark, half-remembered slug: you still get the honest status code, plus a few doors that might be the one you meant. It is a small courtesy. It is also the kind of thing you only build after you have spent a week breaking your own links on purpose.

The boring pass that made the loud pass stick

The rest was the unglamorous layer. A design and SEO pass so the apex looks like the focus it claims. HTML that had been escaping into code blocks like a bad paste from an export, fixed so readers see the page instead of the markup. Internal links that hopped through a 301 before landing, cleaned so the href already points at the destination. None of that makes a good launch tweet. All of it is what keeps a migration from becoming a scavenger hunt for the next person, which in this case is still me on Monday.

I also spent time on the quieter identity work, the kind where your own site still describes who you used to be: training page order, stances, schema that disagreed with itself. That story is in When my own website hadn't caught up with who I'm becoming. Same week, different screwdriver.

So that was the week. Half the house moved out. The apex got a single job. The old paths still resolve. The writing columns are filed, not burned. If your own site is still advertising every version of you at once, the fix is less glamorous than a redesign and more useful than another homepage hero: pick the job the front door is for, give everything else an address, and stop asking one domain to be a polite liar. If you want a hand sorting which doors stay and which ones should move, that is most of what an audit is for, and the contact page still works even if you are not hiring anyone today.