I Let an AI Clean Up My Neglected Website
I built this site in the summer of 2023, wrote two posts, and then life happened. For three years it sat there, a little time capsule. The front page still said I was a paralegal at a job I'd since left. The video page bragged that Exodus 4×4 was "closing in on 30,000 subscribers." (It's at 37,000 now.)
So one weeknight around 10 p.m., I handed the keys to an AI assistant (Claude) and asked it to help me clean house. By midnight the site was cleaner, faster, and actually about my life now. Here's how it went.
How it worked
The assistant can drive a browser window inside its desktop app, so I could watch it click around my WordPress dashboard. There was one hard rule: it doesn't type passwords. When it hit the login screen, it stopped and asked me to sign in myself. After that, it read through the dashboard, the plugins, and every page, and came back with a list of what it found before changing anything.
What it found
- 1,966 comments waiting for approval. Not one was from a real person. It was all spam: town car services in Seattle, casino links, and one very polite "Hello! Good luck :)".
- 8,700 blocked login attempts. Bots had been trying the front door the whole time. The security plugin was doing its job, but it was a good reminder that a forgotten site is still a target.
- Plugin pile-up. Two contact-form plugins, two email-marketing plugins nobody had set up, and two "demo import" tools left over from installing the theme.
- Five unused themes just sitting there, which WordPress itself flags as a security risk.
- A second website I forgot I had. An old client site was still running on my hosting account. The only reason I know is that the assistant searched my email for my hosting account and noticed years of automatic "plugins were updated" notices from it.
What it fixed
- Turned comments off site-wide and sent all 1,966 spam comments to the trash.
- Removed seven plugins and five themes I wasn't using.
- Turned on page caching and automatic image compression from my web host.
- Rewrote the homepage, the Video page, and my old Paralegal page (now "Career"), then updated the menu.
- Started this AI Notebook section, and finished a blog post I'd abandoned as a one-paragraph draft in 2023.
- Fixed the site's clock, which was set to UTC instead of Central time, so posts were dated a day ahead.
Where it hit a wall
Not everything went smoothly, and honestly, that's the part I found most useful.
- It asks before it deletes. When it went to trash the spam comments and remove the old themes, it paused and waited for me to say yes to each one specifically. A general "go ahead with the cleanup" wasn't enough. Slightly annoying at 11 p.m., but exactly what I'd want from anyone with access to my stuff.
- It couldn't get into my hosting control panel. Upgrading the server software and deleting that old client site happen there, and I was locked out. That ended in a help ticket to my web host, so that job is still on the list.
- It needed my story. It could organize and polish, but it didn't know my life. For the nurses' strike post, it asked me four questions, I typed out what I remembered, and it shaped that into the post. The memories are mine; it just helped me get them on the page.
Would I do it again?
Yes. Three years of "I should really update my website" turned into about two hours, and most of that was me reading and approving. My advice if you try it:
- Have it show you what it found before it changes anything.
- Log in yourself. Don't hand over passwords.
- Read every word it writes in your voice before it goes live. Mine got a few details wrong at first, and I'm the only one who could catch them.
Next up in the AI Notebook: using AI to help edit YouTube videos in DaVinci Resolve.
