Kaunas City Museum runs five branches - the Town Hall, Kaunas Castle, and three house museums - with a constant stream of exhibitions, tours, and events across all of them, in two languages. What I inherited was a site that kept crashing.
The Problem
The site had accumulated so many plugins that it was failing under its own weight. Every feature need over the years had been answered with another plugin, and the stack had reached the point where things conflicted, slowed down, and eventually went down. Meanwhile the museum’s core operational need - publishing events across five branches, reliably, daily - was exactly what the site could not do.
What I Did
Less design, more surgery and strategy. I migrated the site to clean hosting, stabilised the foundations, and stripped back the plugin sprawl. Then I built a custom plugin around the museum’s actual event publishing workflow - the thing they do every day - instead of forcing their process through generic tools that half-fit.
Why This Approach
A full rebuild would have been the flashier proposal, but a public institution’s budget deserves the boring, honest answer: keep WordPress, which their team knows, and replace the pile of overlapping plugins with one piece of custom code that does exactly what this museum needs. Fewer moving parts, fewer things to break, no retraining. The site’s job is to publish culture, not to be interesting technically.
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