Retrofitting Elementor sites for institutional work

1. Content audit. Find out what content exists and how it's stored: posts, custom fields, page meta, and the builder's serialized layout data. Everything after this depends on what the audit finds.

2. Decide what the content is. Name the kinds of thing the organization publishes (a program, a staff member, a location, a resource) and how they relate to each other. This is closer to designing a small database than a website.

3. Make it readable by other software. Once the content is organized, the site can send information to your other systems and they can send information back, without a person in the middle.

4. Label each page for search engines and screen readers. Search engines, social previews, and screen readers all do better when a page states what it is. Your organization and the people in it get described once, in one place, so the versions on different pages can't drift apart.

5. Integration. Connect WordPress to the tools the organization uses, such as Action Network, Stripe, or a CRM.

6. Hosting that can keep up. Steps 3 through 5 assume the site can run a task on a schedule, accept a message from another system, and be updated without someone uploading files by hand. Entry-level shared hosting frequently can't, so we move the site to a server we manage, or to a managed platform when procurement calls for one.