Not sure if anyone other than myself and bots experienced the site being down for long stretches over the past week, but it should be reasonably stable now.
Functionality
There were multiple issues. The first pertained to the CDN (content delivery network, which in my case mostly involves caching). I used to get a bandwidth warning from my previous CDN at the very end of the month, if at all. Thanks to the bot explosion facilitated by everybody and his mom jumping on the copyright violation bandwagon, the warning now comes around the 5th of the month.
When you run out of bandwidth, the CDN stops doing what you have a CDN to do. (Unless you pay for more bandwidth, which is a great incentive for the CDN provider to do nothing to prevent non-humans from sucking up your bandwidth, but I digress.) So I switched to a different CDN that blocks a lot of bandwidth-sucking faux traffic with one click of a toggle.
Everything seemed fine with the site. It didn’t occur to me until hours after I didn’t receive an expected webinar invite link that the new CDN might have broken domain mail. I turned off the proxy for email, and my inbox flooded with expired time-sensitive material. Unfortunate, but problem solved, right?
The next day, the site wouldn’t load.
I invested hours in troubleshooting. I eventually got someone to sort-of admit that unless you’re working with a clean install, their thing almost always conflicts with some preexisting thing in a site-breaking fashion. The advice was to back up my content, wipe the site, start over with their thing as the first add-on, and then anything that conflicts with their thing will be an expendable problem.
Instead, I stopped using their thing. And lo, everything functions now!
I can get security via other means, and since this site isn’t image heavy and I optimize my images both before and after uploading, the site isn’t so cumbersome it benefits from caching. (In fact, Litespeed auto-runs hundreds of processes that get the site dinged for performance, but I digress.)
(Mostly) Aesthetics
The old theme had been nagging me to update it for weeks. The developer rarely does anything to it, so I assume any grudging update is to stay in compliance with evolving WordPress standards and shouldn’t be ignored. I kept putting off updating, though, because my list of changes to the PHP files that would have to be re-changed after an update had grown long enough to be a time suck. I especially wasn’t in any hurry after the CDN debacle consumed 6 months’ worth of Site Drama Spoons.
Finally, I got tired of seeing the nag and thought, why not just get a different theme that doesn’t require 20 function modifications to rise to a standard of basic accessibility?
What you see now is Astra right off the rack, all adjustments made within the standard theme customization panel, no custom CSS overrides, no PHP alteration. I made the default body text slightly darker and larger to suit my own eyeballs. After switching links to a slightly darker global color for contrast, my accessibility pre-check has zero warnings. (Awesome to see after Previous Theme, which had three structural warnings baked in even after extensive modifications.)
Results
What about performance?
Right out of the box. When I think about how much work I put into getting Previous Theme almost to that level, I don’t know what I was thinking.
(I was thinking every relationship with a theme would be equally fraught so I might as well stay with the louse I knew. I’m not saying this experience will make me more emotionally available in my personal life, but it’s fodder for a lot of jokes about good things happening when a closed heart becomes open to change.)
New Theme doesn’t do anything specifically designed to annoy me, which is refreshing. I’m designing a new home page for a (far-off) book release, and now there’s nice clean canvas for that. I’m cautiously optimistic that a drama-free website future stretches before me.
At least until the end of the year. Please. As a treat.