Platform Roadmap · Three-Month Engagement
Modernize the MPS Platform
Rebuild on a fast Gutenberg foundation and build the new shopping experience on top of it, with both phases running together over three months.
The Divi page builder loads 84 plugins and weighs on every page, and years of custom code have accumulated. This project rebuilds the site for speed on Gutenberg and builds the new category and shopping experience on top of it, with both phases running concurrently over three months on a staging environment MPS can review throughout.
From the meeting
What we covered on September 11, and how the three months would run.
Direction
- Divi out, Gutenberg in. Migrate the e-commerce site off the page builder and onto core WordPress.
- A three-month timeline, with Phase A and Phase B running together rather than one after the other.
- Launch in the week between Christmas and New Year, a low-traffic window with room to test.
- Category pages reworked in the same pass as the migration, so the layouts are only built once.
- Product data tested first. PDF extraction and schema indexing get proven on sample products before any broader rollout.
How we'll work
- Staging access. A WP Engine staging URL shared with MPS so the build can be watched and reviewed as it goes.
- SEO handled with documentation. URL mapping and redirect tables maintained through cut-over.
- Regular check-ins. Progress summaries and a working session every two weeks for the decisions that need MPS.
- A rehearsed cut-over. The launch window is short, 4 to 6 hours off peak, so the steps are tested on staging first.
The three months
Both phases run in parallel on staging, with the cut-over in the low-traffic window between the holidays.
Phase detail
The theme rebuild is the core of the project. The new shopping experience is built on the fast foundation as it comes together.
Theme & Front End
The core of the project · Runs alongside Phase B on staging
- Speed and usability are the goal. Remove Divi, replace it with a lightweight Gutenberg theme. Every decision serves page speed and ease of use, getting MPS onto a solid, fast foundation.
- A soft transition on staging. Load a full copy of the site to a staging environment and build there. Customers keep using the current store until the new one is finished, and the brand carries through the change, so the switch reads as an upgrade rather than an unfamiliar site.
- Cut the plugin load. The site runs 84 plugins plus 9 must-use plugins today. We audit and reduce, for subscription savings but primarily for speed, fewer conflicts and less to break.
- Evaluate the custom code. A fair amount of custom code exists. We review what genuinely needs to move to the new site and rebuild it cleanly rather than carrying dead weight.
- Performance tooling at launch. WooCommerce high-performance order storage, a heavy caching engine and a page-speed booster, with cache busting at cut-over so returning customers get fresh content without clearing their browsers.
- Preserve SEO. Keep the brand and URL structure intact with a redirect plan. Organic drives roughly a quarter of revenue.
UX & Communications
The new shopping experience · Runs alongside Phase A on staging
- Category & shopping-experience optimization. Rework the categories so a technical buyer finds the right product fast, with shop-by-attribute browsing, cleaner drill-downs and faceted filtering across 2,000 products, down to filtering workbenches by number of legs.
- Cleaner category pages in the same pass. Reworking the appearance alongside the Gutenberg transition avoids building the layouts twice, with AI-generated visuals where product photography does not exist.
- Category browsing plus quote request. Bring the quote-driven path into the browsing experience, so the highest-value cleanroom and configuration requests are one step from the catalog. Brand listings come out of the main area, since they already live in the left-hand sidebar.
- Automations planning session. A working meeting to design the first automated flows, abandoned cart and dormant-customer reactivation, before building them.
The two phases above are sized on their own, but they are not built one after the other. They run at the same time across three months, and the weight shifts between them week to week as the staging build progresses. Rather than quote each phase separately and invoice against a range, we propose running the work as a single flexible marketing account at a set monthly rate. That rate sits inside the combined scope above, and each month is reported against the account, with the hours going to whichever phase the build needs at the time.
What that means in practice: a connection meeting every two weeks covers where the build stands, what was done since the last one, and the decisions coming up, so the account is never a black box. The picture also sharpens as the work progresses, and the plan adjusts with it rather than running to a fixed script.