The site was live — and it was empty, with a US phone number and an address in Alabama

The client has directed theatre for decades and now takes that craft off the stage, training executives and professionals in presence and communication. The site needed to hold up that authority. What was online did the opposite.

What the audit found live

The institutional theme had been installed, but the step of choosing a home page design was never completed. The result: the home page’s main heading, served to every visitor and every search engine, was the theme’s default sentence — "You can set this title from the customizer" — and below the header there was no content at all.

Alongside that, demo data live as if it were real: a phone number in the American placeholder format, a generic email ending in "yourwebsite.com", an office address in Alabama and a footer announcing the site had been created for free. A visitor who wanted to call would be calling nowhere.

Being online is not the same as being published. The site existed, it responded, and it said nothing.

The silent trap: the parent theme was active

Before any customisation, one detail that decides the site’s future: the active theme was the parent theme, not a child theme. Any theme update would have wiped every customisation at once, without warning.

The child theme was rewritten and activated. A front-page file it contained was deliberately removed — it was a workaround built for the old demo header and would have broken the new home page. A full database backup was taken before anything else, as always.

Six pages with original copy

Home, about, methodology, courses and mentoring, contact and blog. Not a line of demo content survived. The copy is original, built from the turning point in the client’s career — from director to mentor — rather than from a generic consultant-site template.

The palette was changed to black, white and grey with dark blue as the single accent: 381 colour replacements in hexadecimal plus 24 more in RGB notation, verified afterwards on the live site, not just in the file.

The contact form that did not exist

The contact component had an empty shortcode, and the builder’s own error message was showing to the public where the form should be. It was rebuilt in Portuguese — name, email, WhatsApp, programme of interest and message — with recipient, subject and reply-to address configured.

Tested end to end with the recipient temporarily redirected, so the test would not land in the client’s inbox. Once delivery was confirmed, the real recipient was restored. Two ghost boxes appearing above the first field were traced to a browser default border and an editor artefact, and removed.

Cleanup that is also security

A plugin installed on the site was running an English demo widget visible to the public, loading 105 KB of stylesheet and tracking visitors — it had already logged 56 events. Disabled. The demo portfolio, testimonial and team sections were removed with integrity checks, and remain recoverable by reimporting the original design.

Performance measured, not estimated

The site was loading six typographic families, around thirty-eight variants, all from an external server. Browser measurement showed only two were actually used on the page. Two families and five variants remained, self-hosted — with no third-party server call on every visit.

Background images went from 846 KB down to 418 KB, and the header image — the heaviest visual element during load — is now preloaded, with the URL read from the theme configuration rather than hardcoded.

What remains

The visible part is a sober institutional site in Portuguese, with a working form. The invisible part is what stops it from sliding back: an active child theme, real data in place of demo data, a stored backup and third-party tracking switched off.