4 Years Without Critical Failures: Clearing Technical Debt on a B2B Website

Copper Mountain Technologies is a US manufacturer of test and measurement equipment for RF systems, operating since 2011. The company is headquartered in Indianapolis (USA), with its R&D and service center in Cyprus and sales offices in Singapore, London, and Miami.

The company develops vector network analyzers (VNAs), calibration kits, and mmWave measurement systems. Engineers around the world use them for R&D, manufacturing, and testing in telecommunications, aerospace, defense, and automotive, as well as in laboratory research.

The corporate website is the company’s main channel for B2B sales and technical support. This is where engineers search for products, contact support, and find technical materials: application notes, case studies, videos, and webinars. The site includes dozens of product and resource pages. Its WordPress stack includes the resource-heavy Slider Revolution, which powers the main slider, and the WP Rocket caching system.

Throughout this time, our team has been updating WordPress and plugins and resolving conflicts between them. However, over years of platform growth, technical debt built up: unused code, redundant plugins, and an outdated PHP version on the server. This debt made maintenance harder and increased the risk of conflicts during updates.

So the next step was a comprehensive technical audit, a codebase cleanup, and the move to PHP 8. In parallel, as part of the platform’s ongoing development, we partially redesigned outdated pages and added a chatbot to the site.

The site had to stay stable and fast despite regular updates across the WordPress ecosystem. Engineers around the world interact with Copper Mountain Technologies through it, so technical issues or errors in contact forms could cost the company leads and the trust of B2B clients.

At the same time, the code cleanup, refactoring, and server environment upgrade had to be carried out without disrupting the product catalog, the technical library, or existing integrations.

A team of six specialists worked on the site: a PM, a Tech Lead, a DevOps engineer, a QA engineer, and two developers. We assemble similar cross-functional teams through our IT staff augmentation services for companies that need to extend their in-house engineering capacity. The work covered four areas: 

• Ongoing support: updating WordPress and plugins and fixing related bugs.

• Technical audit and code cleanup: a comprehensive technical audit of the site, followed by cleaning the codebase of outdated scripts and unused plugins.

• Move to PHP 8: upgrading the server environment and adapting legacy code to maintain compatibility.

• Chatbot and partial redesign: the site gained an additional channel for questions about products and support, and selected pages received an updated design.

1. Engineering Journey

Ongoing support: As part of regular maintenance, the team resolved plugin conflicts on a case-by-case basis as they periodically arose after WordPress updates.

Planned audit: Over time, accumulated technical debt made case-by-case fixes insufficient. The team moved from reactive fixes to a planned, comprehensive technical audit of the entire site.

2. Core Engineering Challenge

The hardest part was removing years of accumulated code and unused plugins and moving to PHP 8 without breaking compatibility with the existing plugins and product pages. Special attention went to the components the site depends on most: the main Slider Revolution slider, WP Rocket caching, and the contact forms.

Upgrading an environment without breaking existing logic is a typical challenge we also handle in custom software development projects, particularly when modernizing legacy systems.

3. Optimization and Integrations

• Conducted a comprehensive technical audit and removed unused plugins and outdated scripts.

• Adapted legacy code to PHP 8 to maintain compatibility.

• Integrated a plugin-based chatbot for questions about products and support.

• Partially redesigned outdated pages.

4. Tech Stack

WordPress · PHP 8 · WP Rocket · Slider Revolution · WordPress chatbot plugin

Technical results:

• Easier maintenance. Without redundant code and unused plugins, the codebase is more transparent, with fewer bugs and plugin conflicts.

• Performance. After optimizing the legacy code and moving to PHP 8, the site runs faster.

Business results:

• A stable engagement channel. For four years, the site where clients search for equipment and request support has run without critical failures.

• An additional contact channel. The chatbot gives visitors another way to ask questions about products and support.