Why I won't take over your existing WordPress site (and what I'll do instead)
A freelance web designer explains why inheriting a WordPress site usually costs more than rebuilding it, and what a clean rebuild looks like.
2 min readMichael Overton
It's a question I get most weeks. "We've got a site already. It was built a few years ago. Could you just take it over and look after it?"
My answer is usually no, and I know that sounds unhelpful. So let me explain, because it's not stubbornness.
What inherited sites look like from the inside
I've opened a lot of them. The pattern is depressingly consistent.
A page builder, often two, because someone added a second one for a single feature. Forty plugins, a dozen of them abandoned by their developers. A theme that was customised by editing the theme files directly, so it can never be updated. Images uploaded at camera resolution. Three contact forms, one of which works. A database full of things nobody can identify.
None of this is the owner's fault. It's what happens when a site is built quickly, then touched by several people over several years, none of whom were there at the start.
Why "just looking after it" doesn't work
The problem isn't the work. It's the responsibility. If I take on a site like that, I'm now the person who gets called when it breaks, and it will break, because the foundations are unsound. Every update is a gamble. Every fix is a patch on a patch. I'd be charging you by the hour to slow down a decline.
I've done it before, early on. Every time, the client ended up spending more over eighteen months than a rebuild would have cost, and they still had a site they didn't love.
What I'll do instead
A clean rebuild. Same content if the content's good, same domain, usually a better structure. Designed around what your business actually needs now, not what it needed in 2019. Built with as few moving parts as the job allows, so there's less to go wrong and less to pay for.
It takes one to ten weeks depending on scope, and it starts from £750. Then I host it and look after it, which I can only promise because I know every part of it.
When I will take a site on
If it was built well, recently, and you just need someone to maintain it, that's different. Send me the login and I'll have a look. I'll tell you straight whether it's a site I can stand behind. Sometimes it is.
But if you've been told your site "just needs a few fixes" more than twice, it probably needs more than that. I'd rather tell you now than six months in.
