← Rescuing a Failing WordPress Project
What should you check first on an inherited site?
Access first: hosting, domain registrar, and WordPress admin, since a lot of inherited sites are effectively locked until ownership gets sorted out. After that, an honest assessment of what’s actually there before touching anything, since no honest quote or plan can happen without first seeing what you’re actually working with.
Access, backups, and the lay of the land
The previous developer often still controls the hosting account, the domain, or the admin login, sometimes all three, and sometimes those accounts are registered in their name or paid on their card. Getting control back to the actual owner is frequently the first real obstacle, before any technical work even starts. Once access is sorted, check for backups: a site with no backup has no safety net, and that changes how carefully you need to proceed with anything else.
Auditing plugins and custom code
Inherited sites tend to share a pattern: software that hasn’t been updated in a long time, plugins whose own developers have stopped supporting them, and custom code nobody documented, so the only person who understood it is gone. None of that is unusual, it’s what most abandoned or long-neglected sites look like underneath. The audit’s job is finding out exactly what’s there before deciding what to do about it.
Finding what is broken
Beyond the obvious (things visibly not working), a site that’s been neglected for a while usually has quieter problems too: broken links accumulated from content changes, removed pages, and expired external domains that visitors and search engines both eventually run into. A direct database scan (checking a site’s stored content for broken URLs instead of crawling every page) finds these without adding server load or tripping a security plugin’s rate limits. See finding broken links in WordPress: a WP-CLI approach for how that kind of scan works, and what to expect when you bring in someone to fix an abandoned WordPress site for the fuller picture of what a takeover assessment actually finds.
Deciding what to keep
Not everything in an inherited site is worth saving, and not everything is worth throwing out either. Some fixes are quick and cheap; some existing builds are tangled enough that starting fresh costs less than untangling them. That call needs an honest answer, not a default toward either option, before committing to the bigger spend either direction requires.
See WordPress repair vs rebuild for how that decision actually gets made.
Talk to 84EM about taking over an inherited WordPress site if you’ve just inherited a build you didn’t create.
