Unhappy with your WordPress support? What a proper takeover looks like

Basically, you get the foundations right before you spend a penny on a redesign.

The thing is, most of our best clients didn’t come to us for a new website. They came because their existing site wasn’t working for them. And the company looking after it wasn’t doing much looking after.

Here’s what we tend to find on those sites, what we fix first, and what good WordPress support should look like. Worth holding your current provider up against it.

Why so many WordPress sites end up in a mess

WordPress’s success has been its ease of use. The reality is, things that are easy to use are also easy to get wrong.

Most people only know one way to add a feature to WordPress. They search for a plugin and install the first one they find. Do that for a few years, across a few different developers, and you end up with a site nobody fully understands.

What we’re seeing is sites arriving with 40 or more plugins. Plenty of them do very little. A plugin installed just to add Google Analytics is a classic, when a single line of code would do the same job. That plugin brings a massive payload with it, and it all adds up to a super slow website.

Slow sites didn’t work when SEO was the only game in town. They work even less now that AI tools such as ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews are deciding which businesses to recommend.

The page builder problem

The other thing we see a lot is sites built with Elementor or similar page builders. They’re sold as a way to let your team change the look and feel without a developer. In practice they often do the opposite.

Page builders overcomplicate the code. They make small changes easy, but those changes have unintended consequences. One came through our doors last week where virtually every page looked as if it had been designed with a different template. Different borders, different grids, different spacing on every page. It just made the whole business look amateurish.

Taking Elementor out of a website is a much harder job. Bit tricky, and not something we’d rush. So we tend to put it back a little and do what we can in the short term:

• move to good, WordPress-specific hosting
• sort out the images
• bring some consistency back into the templates where possible

We’ve been working on WordPress sites for almost as long as WordPress has been around. It’s something we live and breathe. Not all problems are easy to solve, but all problems are solvable.

What a proper takeover looks like

Our approach is pretty much always the same, really. We start with an audit and figure out where the low-hanging fruit are. What can we do that takes the least amount of time and has the biggest impact? Then we work through them in order.

1. Hosting you can roll back

Ideally WordPress should sit on WordPress-specific hosting. There’s a lot of cheap hosting out there, but you want a platform that gives you:

• daily or nightly backups
• a fast rollback if something goes wrong
• a quick way to copy the live site to a separate staging site for testing

2. Security basics

Before anything else, we check that every plugin you run is safe and not on any current vulnerability watch list. We remove the plugins you don’t need, then bring the rest up to date.

We also enforce strong passwords and keep admin access to a minimum. Increasingly we set sites up with two admin accounts: one for someone on the development side and one for someone in your business. Admin access should only be used when it’s needed. That way, if someone gets hit by a bus, your business still has full control of a critical system.

3. Updates done safely

Our support plans start with regular updates to WordPress core and plugins. We’re often asked to take over a site that hasn’t been updated in months, and those first updates can take a little longer.

Updates can break things, so we never do them straight on the live site. The process looks like this:

1. Back up the live site.
2. Pause other changes to the site where we can.
3. Run the updates on a development copy and test everything.
4. If everything works, push the updates live.
5. Keep the backup, so the site can be restored if anything unexpected happens.

It sounds obvious. It’s not always done. It’s often one of the first things we sort when we take a site over.

4. Compliance and cookie consent

UK privacy law says you need consent before you track visitors. We regularly find Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar tracking people before they’ve clicked “accept”.

Not ideal, but it’s usually an easy fix. If you’d rather not have a consent banner at all, cookie-free analytics tools such as Plausible give you useful reporting from fully anonymised data.

5. Quick UX wins

UX (user experience) is how easy your site is to use. Some of the best improvements are small ones:

• moving key content higher up the page
• changing the colour of an important button so it stands out
• cutting the main navigation from eight or nine items down to five or fewer

That last one alone can make a huge difference. Have a look at Swiss Property, an Alpine property specialist we work with. The main menu is just four items: Latest Properties, Buyers Guide, About Us and Contact, plus one “Sell your property” button. Visitors know exactly where to go. None of this breaks the bank.

The work outside your website

With a new client we often start with what’s outside the website. For a local business, that means making sure your NAP (your business name, address and phone number) is identical across every directory and listing. Where it isn’t, a local citation campaign gets the right details showing up consistently across lots of sources.

We also help clients manage their content, so posting to the website and to other platforms is one simple process rather than several chores.

Quick example that might help. When we took over South Coast Powersports’ site, we didn’t rebuild it. We put the right structure around the content and how it was listed. Within six months they had more than 100 high-intent searches ranking. Pretty good going for a support job.

There’s a lot you can do from a support angle without rebuilding the whole website.

Why consistency matters more than ever

NAP consistency is really important. But it goes further than that. If your website says contradictory things, or even slightly different things, it confuses the hell out of AI tools. For example:

• your address is written one way on one page and another way elsewhere
• one page says you’ve completed 25 projects of a certain type and another says 35
• a service goes by three different names across the site

So describe your company the same way throughout the site. Use the same words for each service every time. If you have your own branded name for a service, use it, because that’s what sets you apart from everyone else in the search results.

Technical SEO is important, but it will only go so far. If you’re not talking about your business in a clear, structured way, you’ll confuse your visitors and the AI tools you’re hoping will recommend you. Foundations first, then let the website tell your story.

A takeover in practice: Headmasters

Headmasters is a salon group with more than 50 salons. When they came to us, their WordPress site had so many plugins it barely functioned. More than 40 of them.

The first job was the plugins. Within the first few months we’d got them down to fewer than 10. Pages that had been taking 15 or 16 seconds to load came in well within Google’s Core Web Vitals, the speed and stability standards Google uses to judge page experience. Fast for people, and fast for search engines and AI crawlers.

Once that was sorted, we turned our attention to local search across all of their locations. We’ve been working together for eight years now, and hopefully for a long time to come.

What to ask your current support provider

If you’re not sure whether your support is up to scratch, ask your provider these questions:

• How many plugins does our site run, and do we need them all?
• When were WordPress core and our plugins last updated?
• Do you test updates on a copy of the site before pushing them live?
• How quickly can you restore the site from a backup?
• Who has admin access, and why?
• Is any tracking running before visitors give consent?
• Does our business information match everywhere it appears online?

If the answers are vague, slow or missing, it’s probably time to switch.

Key takeaway: a website that isn’t working rarely needs replacing. It needs a proper audit, the quick wins sorted first, and support that keeps it that way.

Next step: book a free WordPress support audit with our London team, and we’ll show you exactly where your site’s quick wins are.