A cleanup of the Max Gray Foundation site on the new host — its heavy photo library cut by a third, an orphaned security exposure from the previous developer closed, screen-reader accessibility improved, and every form submission preserved, with the site's look untouched.
The bulk of the site's weight was in its image library — a set of full-resolution gallery photographs uploaded straight from a camera, some as large as 12 MB each, far larger than any screen can display.
Oversized photographs were resized to a sensible maximum and recompressed — a 34% reduction that makes gallery pages load faster on phones and mobile data, with no difference the eye can see. The untouched originals were kept in a safe backup.
The site still carried ManageWP remote administrative access tied to the previous developer's account — a standing security exposure. It has been removed, along with a redundant off-site backup plugin and a caching plugin (caching is now handled at the network edge instead).
Page-builder revision history, expired temporary data, and stale scan caches were cleared and the database re-optimized. The active plugin set was trimmed from ten to the seven the site actually uses. All 4,044 Gravity Forms submissions were preserved and verified intact.
A light accessibility pass focused purely on screen-reader usability, with no change to appearance.
Social-media and profile links that previously had no readable label now announce themselves to screen readers. For a nonprofit, this reduces exposure to accessibility-related legal claims — a far more real risk than most realize, and a more relevant one here than cookie compliance.
We reviewed whether a cookie-consent banner was needed. As a nonprofit that runs no advertising or analytics tracking on its pages, the site falls outside California's CCPA/CPRA (which exempts nonprofits and applies only above high revenue/data thresholds). Rather than add an unnecessary banner, effort went to the accessibility work above — the compliance area that genuinely matters for a nonprofit site.
The working copy was open to Google (a duplicate-content risk to the live site) and has been switched to no-index. This must be switched back on at go-live — flagged so it can't be missed.