Taking over a project

Take a backup of the current site, and install it on a dev server. Do not work off the live site – especially as it sound like you don’t have an WP experience at all?

You need to reach out to your main point of contact for the project and get access to the web hosting. From there, you should be able to access the database via phpMyAdmin and change the admin password under the users table. If this all sounds foreign to you, you may want to think twice about this unless it’s a project that has some room for learning as you go.

You’ll want to take some backups so you can work on the project in a development setting – like on a separate server, locally, or on a subdomain. Once you’ve finalized everything, that’s when you can push it live. If you try editing on the live site, you can end up breaking the site with no ability to repair it – that’s not good and it can happen to even seasoned WordPress developers – so make sure you’re taking backups frequently and most importantly when adding themes or plugins.

Anyways, we take the MySQL database and all the WP files for the site in the domains directory and copy it somewhere you can work on it. There are some plugins that allow you to install one plugin on the live site and one plugin on a fresh install of WP and then transfer it (WPVivid or ManageWP are a couple), but otherwise, moving the site requires changing the domain in the database and then doing a find and replace (most likely with a plugin) once you’ve got access to the dashboard.

Create a new admin user for yourself, delete any that may have been from prior users, consider what type of access the prior person had to the hosting account and what may need to change there, change the WordPress Salts and change the database password. Taking over where someone left off is fine and dandy most of the time, but for the sake of security and depending upon why/who you’re taking over, making sure you’re locking them out and preventing them from messing with anything could be really important.

Basically, one of my my **primary concern would be security** on the project. You have really no idea who had access before you, and so I’d error on the side of caution both when it comes to securing WP and also the hosting account.

Next, I’d take the project and divide into 3 separate components: design, SEO, and hosting.

For Design, I’d ask the point of contact to share any PDFs or design material they may have been provided or responded to. It’s possible they’ve already filled out a questionnaire. If not, download a list of questions or something that web designers tend to ask their clients. Write down the answers, figure out who is in charge of media and content, discuss what the objective is, etc and then once you have access to the project in its existing form, review the pages, posts, and media to see what aspects of the site can be taken off from their existing points, which assets can be used that have already been created and what needs to be built.

Having some wire frames or drawing things out on a scratch piece of paper can be really helpful. I like to draw my header and footer out so I can plan and then I also make a list of pages I need, add those in preparation, so that as I add links and such I’m not working retroactively.

Then talk with your client about what they need for customer acquisition and SEO, so you can make a plan for how the content should be laid out, how you’ll want to incorporate alt text in images to be relevant geographically perhaps, structured data, page descriptions and titles, etc.

Then lastly, you’ll want to figure out whether the client has their own hosting or if you’re taking over the project from someone who was using a hosting account. That’s going to determine the direction you go with hosting and then move the site.

I’m not sure how complicated the site is, but if it’s a simple site there shouldn’t be anything crazy to make sense of via reverse engineering and ample time reviewing things to see where they left off.