WordPress is a bit clunky when you switch to HTTPS, so as well as changing your WP_SITEURL (Admin, Settings, General and change the WordPress address & Site address) you’ll probably need to search your DB for all the instances of “https://mikeindustries.com” and replace them with “https://mikeindustries.com” otherwise you’ll get mixed content warnings and things like stylesheets & JS may not load. Running protocol-relative URLs would be nice (setting everything to //example.com) but I’ve tried this a few times with WordPress and wouldn’t recommend it as it seems to subtly break things.

There are a couple of ways to search-and-replace your WordPress DB easily:
* searchreplacedb (a nice PHP script – make sure you delete it when you’re finished, please, as it provides direct access to your DB!) – https://interconnectit.com/products/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/
* wp-cli (if you’re comfortable with the commandline; hopefully your host has it installed already, or you have cmd perms enough to install it yourself) – http://wp-cli.org/

Please back up your database first, just in case!

The former’s pretty straightforward, just download & unzip, rename its directory to something secret, upload it and visit the location. (If you have any issues with v3, as I’ve had with some nginx setups, the older v2 works fine.) It’ll auto-detect all your settings from the wp-config.php file so there’s no messing about with configuration, plus it’ll ask to do a dry run first and prompt you before doing anything for real. PLEASE delete it afterwards though, there are a tonne of sites around that’ve left this script with its original directory name sitting on their servers, then they wonder why they keep leaking all their data and getting hacked :/

wp-cli is a commandline tool, which you may or may not be comfortable with. For Dreamhost there’s a support page here:
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/WordPress_wp-cli

Something along the lines of the following will see you right (lose the –dry-run bit when you’re happy):
wp search-replace “https://mikeindustries.com” “https://mikeindustries.com” –precise –recurse-objects –dry-run

You might want to repeat that for “//www.mikeind…” -> “//mikeind…” if you’ve ever had your site configured that way, too.

Oh, one other thing: you may need to flush your caches afterwards if you use wp-super-cache or another object cache, otherwise things may act a little strange for a while. (wp-cli lets you do this with `wp cache flush` or `wp super-cache flush` depending.)

Finally, on a wider webserver note, you may want to configure an http -> https redirect if you’d like to nudge everyone over to the secure site. Not entirely sure how you do this with Dreamhost, though, sorry!

With free certificates now available with LetsEncrypt, will you be moving to HTTPS for the site?

They’ve recently launched Components, too, which extends on the principles of Underscores and adds some layout options:
http://components.underscores.me/

Adrian: Thanks for the pointer to Bram’s work. Will investigate!

Andrew: I briefly looked at Jeckyl, but for some reason, database-driven publishing still seems like the best choice to me. I don’t want to go back to the days of republishing an entire site every time I make a change.

(I’m jealous as hell of how well you pulled this off.)