Sites with no one left to maintain them.

Most of the work I get isn’t greenfield. It’s a WordPress site someone else built, the developer is gone, and now things break in ways nobody on your team can explain.

I take those over. I sort out what’s actually broken, document what matters, and get the site to a state where it’s maintainable – by me, by your team, or by whoever you hire next.

Freelancer stopped responding. Agency dropped you for a bigger client. The in-house person left without leaving notes. Common ending – and it usually doesn’t come up until something needs fixing and there’s nobody to fix it.

Plugins update and half the site goes down. A theme update breaks the layout. A WordPress core update breaks both. If your site falls apart every time something updates, that’s not bad luck – that’s how it was built.

Pages that loaded fine two years ago now take six seconds. Nobody changed anything obvious, but the bloat accumulated – extra plugins, a database that’s never been cleaned, hosting that didn’t scale with the site. By the time you notice, search rankings are already slipping.

Nobody knows what’s running, why it’s running, or whether it’s safe to remove. The previous developer built things in their own way – custom plugins for problems that already had open-source solutions, hardcoded edits to third-party files, no version control. The site works, mostly. Until it doesn’t.

First job on any takeover is understanding what I’ve inherited. I go through the site systematically – hosting setup, WordPress core version, theme, every plugin, the database, any custom code, the backup situation, security state, performance baseline.

The audit is the basis for the estimate. You see what’s there before you commit to fixing it. If you decide not to proceed, you keep the audit – it’s useful even if I never touch the site.

Sometimes the audit shows that fixing the site costs more than rebuilding it. Outdated theme glued together with workarounds, plugins doing jobs they were never meant to do, architecture that’s going to keep breaking no matter what gets patched.

If that’s where you’ve ended up, I’ll say so – and if you want to rebuild, I can do that too. Either way, you get the recommendation that saves you money, not the one that bills more hours.

Whatever the audit surfaced as urgent or visibly broken, that goes first. Plugin conflicts, security holes, payment processor errors, checkout failures, broken forms, mobile layout issues. The boring critical stuff that’s making the site unreliable.

This is where takeovers earn their keep. Hardcoded edits to third-party plugin files get moved into proper child themes, hooks, and filters – the standard ways of customising things that don’t break when the plugin updates. Custom plugins that duplicate open-source solutions get evaluated: keep, replace, or rebuild. Either way, you stop being locked in to whoever built the original setup.

Database cleanup, image optimisation, render-blocking scripts, hosting review. One recent takeover went from 6+ second load times to under 2 seconds, no design changes – just sorting out years of accumulated bloat. Most takeovers have at least some performance gain available without rebuilding anything.

WordPress core, themes, plugins all brought current. SSL configured properly. Backup system that actually runs. User permissions reviewed. Login security tightened. The basics that should have been there from day one.

At the end of the takeover, you get a written record of what was there, what changed, and what’s worth knowing about. If you hire someone else next year, they’ll be able to pick it up from the document. If you want to manage parts of the site yourself, you’ll know what you’re touching.

I don’t build things in proprietary ways that only I can maintain. Standard WordPress, standard hooks and filters, standard plugins where they make sense. If you want to take the site somewhere else, the next person can pick it up without rebuilding.

After a takeover I’ll usually offer a monthly retainer – updates, backups, monitoring, an hour or two of small changes. Most takeover clients stay on retainer because the site is now somebody’s job again. It’s optional. The takeover stands on its own.

Takeovers scoped individually based on the audit. Audit alone from €400. Full takeover work usually €1,500-€5,000 depending on what’s there. Monthly retainers from €100 follow the takeover – I don’t take on retainers for sites I haven’t worked on first.

A few sentences is enough. What platform the site is on, what’s broken or worrying you, when the previous developer went quiet, any deadlines pressing. I’ll ask follow-up questions if I need more detail. I usually reply within a day or two.