Goodbye WordPress. Hello, one GrowthMentor.
I rebuilt our website inside the app. Now everything lives on www.growthmentor.com.
For years, GrowthMentor lived in two places: a WordPress website on www.growthmentor.com and the product on app.growthmentor.com, where you booked calls and talked to mentors. Keeping both running meant looking after two systems and the experience of moving between them.
I wanted to bring them together. So I took on the rebuild myself, using AI to help me build the website inside our existing Ruby on Rails application. The new site went live in July. WordPress is gone, and the website and app now share one address: www.growthmentor.com.
We cut entire sections of the old site.
The rebuild was also a chance to stop maintaining things that no longer belonged on GrowthMentor. We had accumulated thousands of pages: glossary definitions, location directories, expert and consultant landing pages, VC firm profiles, old articles, and more. Existing was no longer a good enough reason to bring a page over.
We retired whole sections. The old inventories included roughly 565 glossary articles, at least 298 location pages, and 886 VC firm profiles. The expert and consultant landing pages went too. Useful ideas could become part of a stronger guide without rebuilding the old directory around them.
The blog was one part of that cleanup. Of its 386 old posts, we carried 113 forward and retired 273 as standalone posts. The articles and stories we kept needed attention too: rewriting, fixing missing sections, moving images, and connecting the content to the people and product it talks about.
Retiring a page still meant looking after its links.
Every page we retired also meant deciding where its old links should lead. When there was a relevant replacement, we redirected people there, bringing overlapping articles into one stronger post or pointing an old directory page towards a useful guide.
Some of that work continued after launch. I went back through the old addresses and search data, caught pages that were landing on errors, and added redirects. Moving the site meant taking responsibility for the years of links pointing at it.
One website I can keep working on.
There were months of homepage experiments along the way. But the bigger change is that the blog, customer stories, mentor interviews, and membership pages now live inside our Rails app. I can work on the website alongside the product, with the same content system and real mentor profiles to build around.
For you, it means reading a story, finding a mentor, and heading into your account on one website. The old app.growthmentor.com address redirects to www.growthmentor.com.
Alek contributed design work, and Łukasz helped review the code and get it ready for production. I’m grateful for that help.
I took this on because I wanted to own what we put out there, from the pages we publish to the ones we stop maintaining. Having the website and product together makes it much easier to keep improving both. Have a look around and tell me what still needs work.
See what we built. Explore the new website
3 months 