Inheriting a legacy system and optimizing for sustainable growth

Meridian Financial Partners is a financial planning business serving their clients since 2015. With an amazing reputation in the Northern Virginia region, they made previous investments into custom web development with another agency who did a phenomenal job with the design, aesthetic, and overall captured the essence of the Meridian team.

Problem was what was once custom built to be “flexible” and “scalable”, didn’t turn out to be so flexible after all. The agency originally contracted re-purposed this theme, page builder, and associated plugins and could not go outside the box to allow some of Meridian’s latest changes to be easily implemented.

Soon Meridian’s backlog of requests kept piling up, and then when I was introduced to Meridian – to inherit and take over the amazing framework that was original built and truly make it Meridian’s own website.

To make sure the website showcased exactly what it has been missing required significant theme and plugin code revamp, while staying true to the core framework. I believe working within the existing framework and core structure is always the best approach, instead of attempting to bolt on themes or plugins that don’t integrate well with the existing set up.

After implementing a full-site audit, strengthening on-page SEO, optimizing headers and keywords, enabling tagging and filtering for the large catalog of resources available on the site, and tightening the security of the forms and overall theme – the site was ready and updated once again to be shared with potential and current clients.