We cut it over. This site has now been redesigned and has now moved to a new host. Grok Bot and a small team of agent helpers did most of the work, they helped resolve a staging snag in the middle, another issue at the end to go live, and some polish and cleanup after it was live.
I wanted the blog easier to write and publish. Consulting pages still matter, but the blog is why I pushed this rebuild. So, I pointed the agents at migration and cleanup while I stayed on the judgment calls.
Why the old setup had to go
The old site was fine as a brochure. It was not fine for how I work.
Editing and publishing felt constrained. Moving older posts around was tedious. Keeping historical publish dates clean across eras of the site was harder than it should have been. When you write about tools, networks, and AI for a living, fighting your own CMS wastes evening hours.
I also had content debt. Some older posts were thin. Others still carried Word-export junk. A few had fuller versions elsewhere that I wanted restored. None of that was urgent until the blog became the center of the redesign.
What the agents actually did
This was not “press a button, get a new brand.” It was practical migration onto WordPress.
WordPress on EasyWP. We stood up the rebuild on Namecheap EasyWP (Starter), site name “JDB Consulting.” Work happened on a temporary staging hostname first. After the primary domain was attached, that old staging URL went away.
Posts, with dates intact. Eighteen historical posts came over from an older Azure/WordPress export plus the later live-site era. Original publishing dates were preserved on purpose. I do not want a 2014 note pretending it shipped in 2026. Old blog paths have redirects so bookmarks and search results land in the right place.
Cleanup. Word junk got stripped from the older pieces. Where a fuller copy existed elsewhere, we restored text instead of shipping the truncated version. Some posts are still thin; those stay on the polish list. Grok Bot searched on the Wayback Machine to find old posts I no longer had. That would have taken me hours. Grok Bot even suggested that as a solution. I may remove some of the older posts later but I like having the history.
Theme, logo, and pages. The live theme is Sydney, with a custom, Grok generated, JDB monogram in the header and as the site icon. Pages in place: Home, Blog, Services, About, Contact, and FAQs. Classic Editor is installed so I can write the way I already work.
Contact. The Contact page uses a Contact Form 7 form plus a Microsoft Bookings “Book with me” button that opens booking in a new tab. The form delivers messages for the site without putting a public address on the page. Booking stays a button/link that opens in a new tab, not an embedded Bookings iframe. The 1st pass Grok Bot put Bookings in an iframe and that did not work.
I am not pretending Grok Bot redesigned my brand overnight. It moved content, cleaned messes, and got a workable WordPress site standing while I decided what stays and what gets rewritten.
The staging lockdown snag
Mid-rebuild, EasyWP suspended the staging site. Not deleted—suspended. The workshop was locked mid-flight.
Best guess: the bot and I were both editing at once, and the host treated that like a security problem. Plausible. Not something I could confirm from the dashboard. Support was also unsure if that was the issue. Lesson learned either way—one editor at a time on a managed WordPress host, or you may wake up to a locked workshop.
The live old site was never that staging box, so clients were not affected while we got the flag lifted, restored the work, and kept going toward cutover. Thanks to NameCheap support for fixing this quickly.
Cutover day
I started Saturday Morning as my 1st big project with Grok Bot. About 6 hours later it was live. Most of the time was waiting for the cutover. I probably spent 2-3 hours reviewing and managing Grok Bot ‘s work.
Another issue was Let’s Encrypt covering both jdb.net and www.jdb.net failed to generate a good SSL Cert. I went back to NameCheap support and they got that done. I did have to wait about an hour for the encryption to fully populate. HTTPS started working and the site was live.
What you get when you land now is the Sydney build—monogram in the header, eighteen dated posts on the blog (19 when this goes live), services and booking a couple of clicks away, and the old blog paths redirected.
What is still polishing
Cutover is done. Living-site polish is not.
- Visual and copy polish on Home, Services, About, and Contact will keep going.
- A few older posts still need a real rewrite, not just a clean import.
The contact form already works; I am not waiting on a prettier mail path to call that done. None of the remaining polish blocked flipping DNS. I would rather ship a solid WordPress home and tighten the edges in public than wait for every checkbox.
Before and after
Before shots of the old site, and after shots of the live WordPress site — side by side:
Before shots of the old site, and after shots of the live WordPress site:
If you care about the tooling angle: this is the same pattern I use with clients—stage first, migrate carefully, keep history honest, cut over when the new setup is boringly ready. The twist is that Grok Bot and the agent helpers did a large share of the migration and cleanup while I stayed on the judgment calls. And yes, we also learned that managed hosts do not always love two editors at once.
The new site is live. The polish continues. Thanks to my friends and family that reviewed it for visual looks. I took their comments and asked Grok Bot to adjust the look. Minutes later the site was improved. Magical!
— Jonathan Brown · JDB Consulting