Avant Gardening — Website Issues & Hosting Migration

Overview

At the kick-off meeting with Avant Gardening & Landscaping, a live website issue was discovered and discussed alongside a longer-term proposal to migrate hosting from GoDaddy to Asymmetric's managed hosting platform. This article documents the current state of the site, the access requirements needed to begin work, and the case for migration.

Client: ^[1]
Meeting source: ^[2]

Current Website State

• Platform: WordPress
• Host: GoDaddy
• Original developer: Tingles (a graphic design firm that subcontracted web development)
• Issue discovered at kick-off: All lower-level pages returning "not found" errors — only the homepage was loading. The issue appeared to be new, possibly introduced when Tingles' developer added anti-spam measures to the contact form.

"It worked as of last week. We did have some problems with spam coming through on our submissions form. And so I worked with our developer… I don't know if that affected it somehow."
— Tim Stenzel

• SEO risk: Avant Gardening was ranking organically (position ~4 for "landscaping Madison" at time of meeting). Prolonged downtime on interior pages risks a ranking drop.

Relationship with Tingles

Tim's existing web vendor, Tingles, is primarily a graphic design firm. Key concerns raised:

• They subcontract actual web development on an ad-hoc basis
• Response times have been slow; the spam issue required significant back-and-forth
• They do not appear to have strong ongoing WordPress expertise
• Tim expressed low confidence in their ability to manage the site proactively

"It's my feeling they don't really know what's going on with it and they're not terribly interested in keeping it up to date."
— Tim Stenzel

The Asymmetric team has encountered Tingles-built sites before. Note: Tingles sometimes builds in plain PHP with no CMS — confirm WordPress is confirmed here (Tim verified a WordPress login exists).

Immediate Action: Resolve the Broken Pages

Because Asymmetric does not yet have WordPress access, the fastest path to resolution is Tim contacting Tingles directly.

Decision from kick-off: Tim will contact Tingles (specifically Tara Ingalls) to resolve the broken lower-level pages as soon as possible.

Once WordPress admin access is granted to team@asymmetricpro.com, Asymmetric can take over future troubleshooting and maintenance.

WordPress Access Requirements

Tim needs to add team@asymmetricpro.com as a WordPress admin. This will be included in the platform access checklist Chris is sending post-meeting.

See also: ^[3]

Proposed Hosting Migration

Melissa presented Asymmetric's managed hosting offering as a solution to the ongoing instability and lack of proactive management.

Hosting Plan Details

Case for Migration

1. Immediate access: Asymmetric can respond to issues directly without routing through Tingles
2. SEO alignment: Easier to implement and iterate on SEO improvements when hosting is controlled by the same team
3. Proactive management: GoDaddy + Tingles arrangement has been reactive; Tim has been receiving indexing error notices he doesn't understand and can't act on
4. Consolidation: Removes a vendor dependency (Tingles) that Tim has low confidence in

"I would be interested in bringing it all together and have someone who could manage it a lot more because I'll get notices about pages not indexing correctly or this or that and I don't even know what that stuff means."
— Tim Stenzel

Tim expressed openness to exploring the migration. No commitment was made at this meeting.

Current Scope Context

Note that SEO is not currently in scope for this engagement. The active services are:

• Digital Marketing Strategy
• Google Ads
• Meta Ads
• Evergreen Email Campaign
• Lead Conversion Tracking & Custom Analytics Dashboard

Hosting migration and SEO are being positioned as natural future add-ons, particularly if the relationship develops well. The hosting pitch was framed as enabling better SEO outcomes down the road.

Action Items

Related

• ^[4]
• ^[5]
• ^[3]
• ^[6]