Taking Over a Current WordPress Site

  • Unknown's avatar
    taylordiesel · Member ·

    I am currently looking to take over the web design of a site that is currently built on WordPress. It hasn’t been updated or edited in quite some time, and I’m trying to figure out if I should build an entirely new site through WordPress and try to import all products and pages over or if I could take over editing of the current site. (In all honestly, would that be disrespectful to the former editor considering that is their work? After two years without any edits or updates I don’t see them looking to retain the site but understand they did put quite a bit of time in originally 15 years ago). We would need to retain the current shipping settings, payment gateway, domain, and products but would be changing the layout, pages, images, and doing quite a bit of SEO work. Any ideas or advice appreciated. We considered rebuilding on a different site such as Wix but are quickly figuring out that is posing more issues than solutions.

    WP.com: Yes
    Correct account: Yes

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to moderators and staff)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    What’s the URL of the site you’re working on? From your description it sounds like you’re using the open source version of WordPress at another hosting provider, in which case the WordPress.org community who makes that software is in a better position to advise you on this. In this forum we’re only able to help with sites that are hosted on our servers on WordPress.com.

    You can find the WordPress.org community forums here:

    https://wordpress.org/support/forums/

    That said, if it were me I wouldn’t start over from scratch. But I would probably clone the existing site (or work in a staging environment if your host offers that), and start making changes to the copy while the original stays online and accessible. If, for example, your WordPress version is a few versions behind, updating that could introduce a ton of theme and plugin conflicts that will take the site offline, so best to do that on a copy so you can take your time updating WordPress, the theme, and various plugins without the site going offline completely.

    Then you can also experiment with new themes, layouts, etc without disrupting the live site.

    Once you’re happy, then just switch the domain from the old site to the new one/deploy your staging site to production, and migrate any new content (posts, products, orders) that had been added to the original site in the meantime.

    But as I said, the folks over on WordPress.org will be better able to advise on this, as they have much more experience with this type of thing :)

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