WordPress Rescue & Takeover
You’ve inherited a website. The agency that built it has gone quiet, nobody has the logins, the plugins haven’t been updated in two years and you’re not sure whether it’s backed up. Five working days and you get control of it back.
Sound familiar?
The developer who built it is unreachable, or has stopped replying. Nobody's certain where the hosting is, or who's paying for it. WordPress core and the plugins are years behind. There's a backup, probably, somewhere, and it's never been tested. Something on the site is broken and nobody knows how to fix it. You've been told it's "insecure" but nobody has said what that actually means. This is one of the most common situations in small business web, and it's usually nobody's fault. Agencies close, freelancers move on, the person who managed it left. The site keeps running until it doesn't.
What five days gets you
Day 1 — Establish control
Find and document where everything actually lives: hosting, domain, DNS, email, WordPress admin, database, and any third-party services the site depends on. Get you administrative access to all of it, in your name. This alone resolves most of the anxiety.
Day 1 — Backup, taken and tested
Before anything is touched. A backup that has never been restored is not a backup, so we restore it to a staging environment and confirm it works.
Day 2 — Security assessment and lockdown
Check for known compromises, malicious code and unauthorised admin accounts. Remove abandoned plugins and themes. Harden the admin, file permissions and login. Force credential rotation across everything.
Day 3 — Updates, done safely
WordPress core, plugins and theme brought current on staging first, one group at a time, with conflicts resolved as they surface rather than all at once on your live site.
Day 4 — Performance pass
Caching, image optimisation, database cleanup and the obvious wins. Core Web Vitals measured before and after so you can see what changed.
Day 5 — Documentation and handover
A written document covering exactly what you have, where it lives, what we changed, what's still wrong, and what each remaining issue would cost to fix. Yours to keep, whether or not you ever work with us again.
What happens next is up to you
Three things usually happen after a rescue, and all three are fine by us.
Nothing
You have control, documentation and a secure site. Take it to whoever you like. You owe us nothing further.
A care plan
From £150 a month so it doesn't drift back into the same state. Twelve-month minimum, then rolling.
A rebuild
Sometimes the honest finding is that the site isn't worth maintaining. If so we'll say it, and the rescue fee comes off a new build.
No ongoing commitment
It's a fixed-price piece of work. The care plan is offered, not assumed. Very common question: what if we don't have any of the logins? Usually recoverable — domain registration, hosting billing records and email records are the routes back in. Recovering access is part of day one, and if it genuinely can't be recovered we'll tell you within the first day and refund you. WooCommerce stores welcome, and more urgent — an unmaintained store is handling payments and customer data. Same five days, same price, with extra checks on payment configuration and customer data handling.
Get control of your website back
Five days from now you will know exactly what you have, it will be secure and current, and the logins will be in your name. Nothing is touched on the live site until it has been tested on a staging copy first.
- ✓ You've inherited a site and nobody currently maintains it
- ✓ The agency or freelancer who built it has gone quiet
- ✓ You're not sure where the hosting is or whether there's a working backup
- ✓ You've been told the site is insecure but not what that means
Good fit if
- ? The site is actively compromised — malware removal is quoted separately
- ? The site isn't worth maintaining, in which case we'll say so and put the fee toward a rebuild
Worth a conversation first if
Book a rescue — £1,450
Five working days, fixed price, no ongoing commitment. You keep the documentation whether or not you ever work with us again.