Cleaning Up a Club Website That Had Grown for Years
A large recreational club relied on its WordPress website for members-only content, event calendars, forms and member emails. It had grown for years, with plugins added as needs came and went.
The challenge
Several plugins were abandoned by their developers, one broke on current PHP, spam came through the forms, site emails didn’t reliably arrive, and the database was full of leftovers from plugins removed long ago. Any change risked breaking the members’ area.
What we did
- Plugins replaced: Abandoned plugins swapped for maintained ones, and member access moved to a single membership plugin, with every menu checked for visitors, members, lapsed members and administrators
- Spam stopped: Cloudflare Turnstile bot protection added to logins, registrations and every form
- Email fixed: Site email sent through a properly authenticated mail service
- Clutter cleared: 41 orphaned tables, over 16,000 leftover records and 382 unused settings removed
- Accounts tidied: User accounts reconciled against the club’s own membership list
- Speed: Page caching and Cloudflare added
The result
- Faster pages: Data loaded on every page cut from 2.3 MB to under 600 KB, before caching
- No more bot submissions: Forms now reject automated submissions
- Reliable email: Member emails and form notifications arrive
- Less to go wrong: Fewer plugins to update and a smaller target for attackers
Services involved
Website grown messy over the years? Call 04 282 0045 or send us a message.