Here is Opus, summarizing my audit notes…
Three critical risks threaten IANDS' digital presence and require immediate action:
User Experience Failure: With a Google mobile PageSpeed score of 32/100, 30,485 published pages, 1,900+ broken pages, 265,030 broken links and a confusingly deep navigation hierarchy, visitors encounter constant frustrations that damage credibility and cause them to abandon the site at much higher rates.
Search Authority Collapse: For the search term "near death experience," IANDS.org ranks below Wikipedia, NDERF.org, ScientificAmerican.com, SeedsForEternity.com, and PsychologyToday.com—despite being the pioneering authority in this field. Technical issues are costing us thousands of potential visitors monthly.
Security Crisis: The CMS side of the website runs on Joomla 3, which has already reached end-of-life status and no longer receives security updates. This leaves the site vulnerable to known exploits that hackers actively target, creating immediate risks for data breaches and malware distribution.
The Solution: A complete platform migration would eliminate all security vulnerabilities, restore our rightful search engine position, and provide a sustainable foundation for growth. Without action, the site faces escalating risks of compromise, further ranking deterioration, and potential legal liability from data breaches.
A comprehensive technical audit of IANDS.org and all subdomains (30,485 pages analyzed on August 10, 2025) reveals systemic failures requiring immediate intervention. The site's Wordpress/Joomla 3 hybrid architecture has reached a critical failure point where remediation would cost more than replacement.
Operating on end-of-life Joomla 3 exposes the organization to:
Active exploitation of known vulnerabilities that hackers scan for daily
Legal liability from potential breach of member and donor data
Browser warnings that could flag the site as dangerous to visitors
Insurance and compliance violations from operating unsupported software
The situation will worsen as Joomla 4 reaches end-of-life in less than 30 days, and while migration from version 3 to version 5 is theoretically possible, such migrations typically fail due to plugin incompatibilities, database structure changes, and broken custom code.
Our website's architecture contains fundamental flaws preventing it from ranking appropriately:
Content Chaos: The database contains over 30,000 published pages despite far less actual content. A Joomla misconfiguration treats every internal search query as a unique, indexable page—the shopping directory alone has generated 2,000+ phantom pages. This massive duplication tells Google our site lacks focus and authority.
Split Authority: The site remains accessible through both www.iands.org and iands.org without proper redirects, effectively cutting our SEO power in half. Search engines see two redundant and diluted sites instead of one authoritative source.
Broken Architecture:
6,000+ error pages creating dead ends throughout the site
276,000+ broken links undermining credibility
4.7 million internal links (averaging 156 per page) creating an unusable navigation maze
Massive menu system that is up to 5 levels deep, overwhelming visitors with choices
A ‘content first’ approach instead of ‘user first’ for information architecture
Fragmented Presence: Valuable content on separate subdomains (conference.iands.org, isgo.iands.org, symposium.iands.org) doesn't contribute to our main domain's authority. This architectural mistake alone may be costing you 2-3 positions in search rankings.
Page Speed Emergency: Our score of 32/100 falls far below Google's minimum acceptable threshold of 50 and crushes the user experience through:
Unoptimized images that slow every page load
Redundant CSS files and persistent plugin errors
Poor mobile experience despite 60% of web traffic coming from phones
Homepage Opportunity Loss: The homepage—the most valuable digital real estate—consists primarily of two very large header navigation menus, one single hero image, nine blog posts, and a footer menu with limited options. This misses the critical opportunity to immediately communicate our mission, engage visitors, and guide them to key content.
Our volunteers have done remarkable work keeping the site running despite increasing technical challenges. They've managed an increasingly complex system with dedication and creativity. However, when organizations rely on rotating volunteers without specific technical expertise for infrastructure decisions, the inevitable result is a patchwork of well-intentioned but unsustainable solutions. Each volunteer brings their own approach, partial implementations accumulate, and technical debt compounds exponentially.
This pattern, while cost-effective initially, leads to situations like the current one—where fixing accumulated problems costs significantly more than proper initial implementation. The website has become a digital archaeological site with layers of different approaches creating an unmaintainable system.
In today's digital-first world, our website isn't just a communication tool—it's the primary interface between our mission and community. Organizations that thrive recognize that digital infrastructure requires the same strategic attention as physical facilities or program development.
Successful digital governance requires:
Board-Level Strategic Vision: Clear, measurable objectives for digital presence that align with organizational mission, with appropriate resource allocation
Professional Technical Leadership: A designated individual with demonstrable expertise who has both authority and accountability for digital infrastructure decisions
Investment in Professional Execution: Mission-critical technical work demands professional contractors with proven track records—the false economy of volunteer technical work typically results in exponentially higher remediation costs
Sustainable Architecture: Digital infrastructure designed for maintainability and longevity rather than immediate convenience
Given the interconnected nature of these issues, incremental fixes would be like renovating a building with foundation failure—expensive, temporary, and ultimately futile. The technical debt has reached a point where remediation would exceed replacement costs.
A complete content migration to a modern platform would:
Extract all valuable content through automated scraping
Restructure information architecture based on user needs and SEO best practices
Implement on a contemporary platform with built-in security and performance optimization
Consolidate all subdomains under the primary domain
Establish sustainable maintenance protocols
Leading platforms include Webflow or similar enterprise-grade solutions - not Wordpress. Webflow particularly excels in providing:
Excellent and fast design with no-code editing capabilities
Automatic security updates eliminating vulnerability windows
Built-in SEO optimization and performance features
Content management without technical expertise requirements
Integrated e-commerce capabilities
Responsive design as standard
Professional project management firms typically have an internal cost of $1,500-$3,000 for subcontractors on a migration of this scope. We can help IANDS find qualified contractors at this price range. This investment would:
Eliminate all current security vulnerabilities immediately
Restore search engine rankings to reflect our authority
Reduce ongoing maintenance costs by 60-80%
Improve user engagement and conversion rates
Provide a sustainable platform for the next 5-10 years
Automated website scraping and data structuring tools ensure complete content preservation while eliminating manual data entry, significantly reducing both timeline and budget.
WordPress's position as the dominant CMS with over 40% market share has become a misleading metric that obscures its fundamental inadequacies for modern web development. The "largest installed base" argument commits a classic bandwagon fallacy – popularity doesn't equate to quality or suitability, especially when that popularity stems from legacy installations, low-barrier entry for hobbyists, and the inertia of existing sites rather than active selection by professional developers. The vast majority of WordPress installations are simple blogs, small business brochure sites, or abandoned projects, not the dynamic, high-performance applications that define today's serious web presence. This market share statistic also fails to account for the disproportionate resources required to maintain, secure, and scale WordPress sites compared to modern alternatives.
The platform's architecture, rooted in its 2003 origins as blogging software, fundamentally handicaps serious web projects through its monolithic structure, database-heavy operations, and plugin dependency hell. Performance degradation is inevitable as WordPress sites grow, with even basic caching unable to compensate for the inefficient query patterns and bloated codebase that processes every request through layers of legacy abstractions. Security remains a perpetual nightmare, with the plugin ecosystem creating an ever-expanding attack surface that requires constant vigilance and updates. Meanwhile, modern frameworks offer component-based architectures, static site generation, edge computing capabilities, and serverless deployments that deliver superior performance, security, and developer experience. The opportunity cost of wrestling with WordPress's limitations – from its outdated theming system to its lack of native version control – far exceeds any perceived benefit from its familiar interface or extensive plugin library.
We are committed to supporting IANDS through this critical transition. To be clear: we are not seeking to manage or execute this migration, nor are we selling any services. We simply want to help ensure that IANDS’ very important mission continues without digital barriers.
We are pleased to offer at no charge:
Complete automated website scraping to capture all existing content
Custom automation code for properly structuring scraped data
Custom automation code for loading data into our new platform
Guidance on content architecture planning
Support in contractor evaluation and selection
Strategic migration planning assistance
These contributions would eliminate manual data entry needs and reduce our migration costs by several thousand dollars, ensuring a smooth transition to a sustainable platform.
We stand ready to support this transition in whatever way would be most helpful!