Ever since I started at Universal Yums, I’ve wanted to rebuild the WordPress theme. In its six years of existence style overrides have been layered on top of each other making new development really difficult. JavaScript was mostly in one massive file. The build system was outdated and clunky.

However, rebuilding a site that’s still in active development and has thousands of customers a day is tricky. You either freeze most development on the live site while the developers hide out and build a fresh theme (which wasn’t an option for us and has the risk of introducing too many bugs all at once), or very slowly refactor and rebuild the existing theme over time (which can be really difficult if you want to move to a completely new grid system or rip out Bootstrap v3 for example).

Or, maybe there is a third way?

It feels like a bit of a hack, but it definitely works. We found a method that allowed us to deploy a new theme in phases- one page or set of URLs at a time. This introduces much less risk and allows us to maintain a similar development velocity on the live site. The solution was to load the new theme for specific URLs as we completed development on them.

We’ve been successfully running on production for several weeks now with large amounts of traffic.
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