Challenge
An online music education business sells hundreds of video lessons and three membership tiers through WordPress and WooCommerce. The owner wanted a fresh look: new photography, a new color scheme, and a homepage that sells memberships better. He drafted a complete design himself with AI tools and brought it to 84EM to make real.
The site had passed through more than five developers and several page builders over the years. Elementor still owned the homepage, the account page, the signup page, both member welcome pages, and the footer on every page. Each hand-off had left behind orphaned data, plugins nobody could account for, and its own way of doing things, including plugins running on nulled, unlicensed copies. With revenue slowing, the owner set a firm budget and a deadline before Labor Day, and asked to be told plainly which parts of his design would cost more than they were worth.
Leaving the page builder in place meant every future design change would go through it. Removing it carelessly was worse: its footer template rendered sitewide, so a naive uninstall would have stripped the footer from more than 2,700 pages of lessons, products, and forum threads.
Solution
84EM reviewed the design package against the live site and returned two proposals within days: a plugin and license audit, and a phased redesign. The redesign kept the existing theme, applied the new design across the entire site, and removed the page builder for good.
The five builder-built pages were rebuilt as regular theme templates. The sitewide footer moved into the theme first, so the builder could be uninstalled without touching lesson access, checkout, memberships, or search. Every color, typeface, and spacing value from the approved mockups became one shared set of design tokens, so the header, footer, homepage, signup, account, welcome, lesson, and FAQ pages all draw from a single source.
The plugin audit went plugin by plugin. Anything no longer in use was removed. Nulled plugins were replaced with properly licensed versions, closing the security exposure and the update gap that come with pirated copies, and answering the recurring host security warnings the owner had been receiving. Client feedback ran through review rounds on a staging copy, each fix shipped as its own small change, and the site went live on 2026-08-26, ahead of the Labor Day target.
Key Capabilities
- One shared design system. Colors, type, and spacing come from a single token set, so a future change is made once and shows up everywhere.
- No page-builder dependency. The site carries no builder licensing, bloat, or lock-in, and the design lives in the theme where any WordPress developer can maintain it.
- Lesson access untouched. Memberships, individual purchases, and download limits kept working exactly as before; only the presentation changed.
- Membership-aware pages. Welcome, account, and lesson pages show the right content and calls to action for guests, single-lesson buyers, and members.
- Cleaner structure. Heading hierarchy, skip links, and keyboard focus were corrected across every template as part of the rebuild.
Results
Before, five key pages and the sitewide footer depended on a page builder. After, none do. The builder and its paid add-on are uninstalled, and the design changes the owner asked for are made in one place.
The owner’s two stated goals, new photography and a new color scheme, shipped as approved: his photographs on the homepage and signup page, and the new palette and typeface on every page of the site.
From the first call on 2026-07-24 to production launch on 2026-08-26 took five weeks, inside the deadline and the budget the owner set. The work landed as 52 reviewed pull requests, with client feedback from staging folded in along the way.
Members and lesson buyers saw a new site with the same access they had the day before. Nothing they had paid for moved, and nothing about how they log in, buy, or download changed.
