Jen Miller and Mitch Canter from WebDevStudios presented a real-world case study at WordCamp US 2025: how they migrated the Jim Joseph Foundation to a block theme iteratively, on a limited budget, with zero disruption to daily operations.
Some conference sessions give you theory. This one gave you a blueprint. The presentation by Jen Miller and Mitch Canter from WebDevStudios at WordCamp US 2025 was one of those rare talks where the audience reaction tells you everything. People were leaning forward, taking notes, and nodding through the whole thing. Having attended both the contributor day and the main conference at WordCamp US 2025, I can say this session stood out as one of the most immediately applicable of the entire event.
Meet the Team Behind the Project
Jen Miller — Director of Business Development, WebDevStudios
Jen brings 25 years of experience across print and digital media, covering every dimension of WordPress publishing and development. Her background is genuinely unusual for a senior agency leader: she built and ran her own digital marketing agency before moving into her current role leading sales and marketing at WebDevStudios. That combination of founder experience and enterprise-level execution gives her a perspective that’s hard to fake.
She is a core WordPress contributor and has organized WordCamp events in Los Angeles, Orange County, Riverside, and Phoenix. Academically, she holds a Bachelor of Arts, a Master of Science in Management and Leadership, an MBA, and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of the Cumberlands, with her Ph.D. in Business with a focus on entrepreneurship expected this fall.
Outside of work, Jen lives near Phoenix, Arizona, raising two teenage sons and a goldendoodle named Cutie. She volunteers remotely to help students in Southeast Asia develop skills for university success.
Mitch Canter — Director of Engineering, WebDevStudios
Mitch leads WebDevStudios’ engineering team with over 20 years of hands-on WordPress experience. His technical range covers custom plugin development, theme architecture, project management, and engineering culture. He’s the kind of engineering director who still writes code, and that shows in how he talks about problems.
Before WebDevStudios, Mitch worked with agencies, companies, and independent creators worldwide. He built award-winning websites, helped podcasters launch and grow, and wrote extensively about WordPress for general audiences. He holds a degree in Advertising from Murray State University and has spoken at conferences globally on WordPress, web development, and digital marketing.
When he’s not working, Mitch games, streams on Twitch, and spends time outdoors. He lives in Spring Hill, Tennessee, with his wife and children.
The Problem: A Foundation Website That Had Fallen Behind
In May 2025, the Jim Joseph Foundation needed to modernize its website. The existing site was outdated and underperforming, and that was a real problem for an organization whose mission — inspiring Jewish youth and young adults across the United States to lead connected, meaningful, purpose-driven lives — depends on digital presence to reach its audience.
The constraints were real: limited budget, no tolerance for operational disruption, and a content team that needed to keep publishing throughout the transition. A full rebuild from scratch was not a viable option. So WebDevStudios found a better one.
The Solution: Theme Switching Technology
The approach WebDevStudios developed uses conditional logic to run multiple WordPress themes simultaneously on a single website. Instead of replacing everything at once, the Jim Joseph Foundation team could build out new block-based templates gradually, swapping them in page by page while the existing classic templates continued to serve the rest of the site.
This meant the foundation’s team was never locked out of their own site. Content kept going out on schedule. Editors didn’t need to learn a new system overnight. And the development team could iterate, test, and refine each section before it went live, rather than crossing their fingers on a big-bang launch.
The result is a site that is fully aligned with WordPress block architecture, delivers a significantly improved user experience, and supports flexible content creation. It got there without a single moment where someone had to say: “The website is down while we update.”
Watch the Full Presentation (English)
Here’s what the talk covers, with timestamps:
- 00:36 — Speaker introductions
- 01:16 — Jim Joseph Foundation overview
- 02:05 — Why the website needed to change
- 03:42 — Traditional vs. iterative web development approaches
- 05:24 — Introduction to theme switching technology
- 10:27 — Benefits of the iterative migration model
- 15:49 — Performance improvements demonstrated
- 19:08 — Lessons learned throughout the process
- 22:06 — Q&A with the audience
- 27:26 — Closing remarks and contact information
Why This Matters Beyond One Case Study
The Jim Joseph Foundation project is a useful model precisely because its constraints are so common. Most organizations sitting on outdated WordPress sites aren’t avoiding migration because they don’t understand block themes. They’re avoiding it because they can’t afford the disruption, the budget, or the risk of something breaking mid-launch.
The theme switching approach dissolves all three of those objections. It is particularly well-suited to nonprofits and smaller organizations that need to modernize without the resources to go dark while rebuilding. But the logic applies just as well to any content-heavy site where continuity is non-negotiable.
What Jen and Mitch demonstrated is that the choice between “keep the old site running” and “migrate to block themes” is a false one. With the right architecture, you can do both at the same time.
WordCamp US 2025, Jen Miller, Mitch Canter, WebDevStudios, theme switching WordPress, block theme migration, Jim Joseph Foundation, WordPress development, iterative web development, nonprofit WordPress,
