WonderSuite Series #3 – You’ve inherited a website… now what?

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Hello? Hello? Hello. Hi there. Hi Chris. How are you doing? Doing great. That's good to hear. Chris, David Miles, you can see him over there and he's joining us from Bluehost. He was here a couple of weeks ago. We, we weren't expecting Chris, but Chris stepped in because, the presentation that we were due to give has been pushed to next week.

we don't need to go into the reasons, you know how these things go. Chris has stepped in and in the four-part webinar series, his was due to be episode four and it's actually become episode three. So everything is the same, but it's. the same, but different, if But, thank you for joining us, Chris. just before we hand over to you, I'm just going to say a couple of bits and pieces about housekeeping related things. if you're watching this and you're on our webpage, wp builds.com/live, that's a good place to be. You need to be logged into a Google account if you want to make any comments, because it's YouTube comments, you'll find that box over at the right on a desktop or underneath on a mobile.

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Then you need to do one extra little thing, and that is to give Wave Video our platform, the ability to see who you are. Head to wave video slash lives slash Facebook and click the button to authorize us to see your avatar and name and so on. Okay. In the first installment we had Chris on and he was talking about, wonder Start a way to kickstart and really speed up the process of starting up a website.

last week we had Jocelyn, she was on and she was talking about Wander Cart, and she showed us all of the bits and pieces about what Wander Cartt can do to help your e-commerce journey. Now, given Chris that this was supposed to be episode four, but we've pushed it to episode three, what are we talking about today?

[00:03:09] Chris David Miles: Today we're gonna be talking about. situations where you've inherited a website, so you don't always get to start a project at the beginning. sometimes you have to take over something that is built by somebody else. and so there's a lot of considerations there of, you didn't get to pick all of the plugins, you didn't get to pick everything that happened or make all of the decisions.

And there's a handoff involved and there's, a lot of things that sometimes you have to think about when you're taking over a website or a web project from somebody else. And this walks through, Hey, what are some of the common pitfalls to that? What are the best practices to consider? and what are the things that you'll basically just need to be thinking about if you're inheriting something from somebody else online.

[00:04:01] Nathan Wrigley: If you've ever done this before, you know the pain is real. There's a lot of moving parts, actually. It's not like buying and selling a car where there's one object. This is, there's loads going on when you take over for a website. There really are dozens and dozens of pieces. If you've done it many, times before, you've probably got a workflow going on.

Nevertheless, Chris might have some new in intuitions as to better way to do it, but if you haven't done it too many times before, let's tune into what Chris has to say and see if he can save you some time and stress and tears, because, yeah. Yeah. Shall I share your screen, Chris, and we'll crack on. Go ahead.

Yeah. Alrighty.

[00:04:40] Chris David Miles: Here we go. yeah. inheriting a website can be a tricky thing. And, feel free Nathan to, to interject as well with any questions or any comments or horror stories you have. Sure. Yeah. But, yeah, the, part of what makes it tricky is that it's not just one surprise of, oh, let me just look through the site.

It's, there tends to be, in my experience and in the experiences I've talked to with others, a series of surprises where maybe six months down the road you'll find out, oh, I didn't even realize this plugin is being used over here, or this other service is running over here. And one of the things we're gonna try and cover is how to.

Understand and mitigate as much and accept as much of that risk as possible early on in the process. doesn't mean necessarily that you have to fix everything right away necessarily, but getting a better understanding of what it is that you're actually. Taking ownership of. so let's start out with, oh, and before we even really jump in too far, one thing to keep in mind is that this is general advice and it's not absolute.

So it's not everything we talk about here is gonna apply to every situation. so try to think about whether or not each aspect applies to you. Some will be more relevant to agencies, some will be more relevant to hobby projects and things like that, but yeah. so let's go through it. at first you'll want to assess what it is that you're actually taking over.

What is really being handed off? Is it hosting, like the whole hosting package? Is it just a website? if someone tells you. Oh, it's a website or it's an app. That's not enough information because there's a lot of things it could be, and it might actually be multiple websites that just link to each other.

And also maybe a help desk and also maybe a ticket portal. And also, oftentimes if you are the website person and you're taking it over from another website person and then you have, some, client or some, owner, oftentimes it's not immediately obvious what all of the aspects of it are.

And so you should try to go through, almost develop like a checklist of, here's all the things I'm gonna look for, I'm gonna ask about and explore. So one of the things you'll wanna look for is who owns the domain name? I. Like the actual, if, you have, nathan.com or something, figure out what account that's in, right?

And maybe that's already, taken care of. And maybe that's already good, but, figure it out and make sure that it's not a surprise come time to renew it. Figure out who owns the hosting, what the logins are for the hosting package. And we'll talk about how to do handoffs a little bit later and, credentials and safe ways to go about that.

But just figure out where those things are. 'cause maybe, the domain name is over here and the hosting is over here. Maybe they're on the same account or maybe, and. Sometimes you'll, even find people don't know, which is, seems like a, it should be surprising or uncommon, but it's very common for people to actually precisely know.

It truly

[00:08:27] Nathan Wrigley: is. I got an email actually today from a client that I no longer deal with who we severed ties four years ago. Asking if I had any idea who owned his domain. I said I own, no, it's not me.

[00:08:41] Chris David Miles: Precisely. 'cause it sometimes it's not obvious or you might think oh, I've got a I'll just make up a company.

I've got a host Gator account. And, I think it's in there and, turns out you really do, but that's not where, and you'll look it up and Yeah, it looks like the domain registration is with Host Gator, but it turns out it's a different host Gator account owned by the previous web person.

I. Not the one that your client has. So just because they're the same company, don't necessarily assume that like you'll wanna log in and actually check does the domain registration really exist in this account that I've been given? Yeah. and then also try to identify any, third party services subscriptions.

maybe there's like a Zendesk subscription or a MailChimp subscription or something like that. even, if you know a little bit about how websites work, sometimes that can almost turn into like bias for us, where if you know how websites work and if you're used to how websites work, it's, it might be obvious to us like.

What is a website and what is not. And like you might think of it like, oh, email blasts, that's not the website, but the owner might not think of it that way of oh yeah, every time there's a blog post, there's an email blast sent out. I don't know how that works, but it's part of the website.

It's yeah, so like you'll wanna figure out these, kind of, ancillary things that are people might be thinking of as the website, even if technically it's not. Yeah, good point. and, honestly, some, one of the best ways to do this, other than just exploring it, is to engage with whoever was managing it before.

Either the original owner or the original, oh, this was my web person before. And just to understand their past responsibilities, to understand, what accounts exist, what needs to be handed off. 'cause oftentimes they'll know and they'll just have a. A spreadsheet, but yeah.

[00:10:47] Nathan Wrigley: And that little piece there can get quite thorny, can't it?

Because sometimes the relationship between the previous developer and the client is completely broken down. And the developer who you need to speak to is Ill prepared to speak to you. they've really got their backup. The client's left them. They had an argument. I've had situations where Just speaking to the older developer and calming them down and saying, look, I don't have a fight with you. It's nothing to do with me. I'm just doing my job. Can we please just trade information? It's a whole skill. exactly. A whole skill.

[00:11:20] Chris David Miles: Yeah. Yeah. And so sometimes it does require a little bit of diplomacy.

Yeah. To if the relationship isn't great and you'll want to as much as you can. Try to keep that relationship good between you and the previous owner because there's a non-trivial chance that six months from now you're going to be going back to this person asking, Hey, do you know anything about a GoDaddy account?

Yeah. Because there's one that nobody can find. Yep. I'm with you. so yeah, the actual handoff. So ideally, handoffs are well coordinated and everything keeps moving and you can pass the baton and, everything's great. But in practice, a lot of times the analogy I hear most often is throwing things over the fence, right?

Or throwing things over the wall, which is just more okay, here's your backup. Who knows how it's formatted, or, whatever the database is in there may be somewhere. Here's your backup. Good luck. We're, gone. The DNS is pointed somewhere, and part of that is, try to work with the other person if that's possible.

But yeah, the, as, as far as the actual like handoff itself, just try to get access to all of the things that you're gonna need access to. we'll talk a little bit about ways to share, credentials, but the, you're talking about like passwords, the third party services, the registrar for the domain name, the hosting.

You're also gonna wanna look into, whether or not email is in scope for you. Yeah. Particularly whatever email addresses are on file for these accounts. So you're gonna wanna look at the WP admin main email you're gonna wanna look at, if there's an email on file for the hosting package.

Okay. Where does that go? Does that go to you? Does that go to your client? Does that go to the previous web person's agency? you're gonna wanna make sure those get updated as well. because. You want your password resets to work, you want your, warning emails and whatever else to continue to work.

So make sure you include email as much as necessary in that. So yeah, you'll wanna update passwords. you'll want to apply the principle of least privilege, which we can talk about a little bit. But basically, if you go through and figure out what level of access everyone needs, maybe there's a team of people.

What's often best is for people to get the level of access that is the least amount that allows them to do their job. And that's not being rude. That's actually making things easier for everybody because if, you have people that have more access than they really need, you're relying on. Them never getting hacked, their computer to never get hacked, their phone, to never get hacked, their email to never get hacked as part of the perimeter of security around this whole project or around your website.

And so if, I'll just make up an example. You've got a sales manager that only needs to be able to update blog posts but doesn't need to be able to, let's say, install plugins on your site. probably try to make sure that those permissions in WP admin are good. That, that they only have access to do the things that probably they need to do.

And not much more than that. If somebody doesn't need access to the domain name registration or the DNS, Probably they shouldn't have access to it, because if they're not gonna use it, then you don't have to count on their email never getting hacked or something like that for, it to be safe. So it's, not just about oh, we, we don't trust people or something like that. It's, really about, hey, it's easy to keep everybody safe if you don't even have to give access to people things that they shouldn't have. and so you're, actually doing everybody a favor by putting up some training wheels to where Hey, no, it's totally fine.

You can change whatever you wanna change. And all it's gonna do is make changes to the parts that you're, entrusted with, which is pretty nice. Sometimes what you'll wanna do here is with clients, you'll want to, you don't need to make it a secret or anything like that. Like you'll want to explain to them, what you're doing and, what.

What sort of changes you, you wanna make there to permissions and things like that. And sometimes it helps, to even explain user roles in WordPress to a client to be able to say things like, oh, there's a level of access needed for a developer, and there's a level of access needed for a manager, right?

Because if you, just use the default name, sometimes the point doesn't get across all the way of oh, I want the highest level 'cause I own it. It's yeah, you certainly can. but like the, depending on who it is, it might make sense to actually have a level of access where you never have to worry about breaking stuff.

and obviously you don't wanna have a situation where you've locked out the real owner of something like that. But if you can make it easy on your client and have a situation where, okay, the account that you're using every day to log in. that only does this, of course you can get access to my account if you want.

And there's ways to recover access or whatever. You have the, maybe the owner has the WP admin email on file or something. But if you giving everyone just the access that they need, it'll end up being a lot safer. yeah.

[00:17:46] Nathan Wrigley: Nobody wants to be caught up in that maelstrom of possibly being responsible for something because you just rule everybody out in any scenario.

If their permissions do not allow that thing to have happened, who deleted a hundred blog posts? it can't have been me because Exactly, I'm not allowed to do that.

[00:18:04] Chris David Miles: Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. So it can be really nice and, even at, just on a more personal note at work, there's plenty of times when I have to specifically request, Hey, I wanna run like information, I wanna access to some.

Report or something like that for analytics, for my job as a product manager and I often will specify, and I wanna make sure I don't have right access to any of this. I only am gonna be pulling reports. So if something goes wrong with, bad data somewhere, I wanna be sure that's never my fault.

Yeah, nice. Yeah. Yeah. So like for the same thing for your clients, but yeah, we can move on. conduct a, security audit, just a really brief one when you first get the site and just look through and see okay, what sort of accounts are here? What, what sort of plugins are here, what are they using for, a web app firewall?

What are, just the sort of things that you would do for security on a site that you maintain. And if you're not sure what to look for do maybe a little bit of research and find out like what are some good best practices for. locking down a site, but honestly, just getting it to a state where you are comfortable with it on a first pass is probably enough.

I've just looked through for anything that you think, might need to be improved and just take notes of it. You don't have to make drastic changes right away, but just take a quick audit of things that you think, Hey, maybe we shouldn't use this plugin, or maybe we should add this other plugin.

Or maybe, we should add a, web app firewall in front of the site. Personally, I really like using CloudFlare for basically every website. Yeah, yeah. and so that's a very easy thing to add and non-destructive, thing that you can do that adds a lot of security and often speed to a website.

but yeah, so this is just during the initial handoff where you've gotten access to things. and let me skip ahead a little bit to, talk a little bit about the, how to, handoff credentials. So one of the things you'll wanna do is you can email passwords and usernames back and forth if that's your only option, but I really, wouldn't recommend it because Time.

Yeah. if, one thing you wanna think about is the way email works is fundamentally it's meant to be read and discovered. It's meant to be downloaded to your phone and to your computer, and to the internet, and. Even really good secure solutions for email, like, Microsoft and Gmail and, some of those people get into 'em.

and so if your email is compromised or if anyone else's email is ever compromised years down the road, they're gonna scan every email you have going back to, 2007 or whenever you got the email address looking for usernames and passwords. And so like really, try to avoid emailing credentials.

It's much, much better if you can use a solution that is specific to sharing credentials. Something like, one password, something like LastPass. there's even open source solutions for this, but use a password manager and share and delegate access that way, rather than. Emailing usernames and passwords.

but sometimes you're in a situation where that is the only way your client knows how to do, like credential sharing. And if that's the case, then immediately change those passwords. don't wait for something out, like immediately, change those passwords. Imagine, even though it's not true, but imagine that email is completely public and that it can be crawled by Google, right?

That's if you treat your email a little bit like that, it's a little bit safer to do. Yeah. So

[00:22:27] Nathan Wrigley: Totally agree. Yeah. So I, so you don't one of those hanging around in your inbox for

[00:22:31] Chris David Miles: decades to come? Exactly. Yeah. I really like one password. I think that's one that one's paid. It's $4 a month or something.

There's free ones. LastPass does exist. I don't particularly personally like LastPass, just they're. History of Yeah. act many, times.

[00:22:50] Nathan Wrigley: I'm not, yeah. Don't even go there. Yeah. 18 months ago it all went pear shaped. I used Bit Warn. Yeah. I'm

[00:22:58] Chris David Miles: happy with Bit warden. Bit warden's great. Yeah. and you can even self-host it, but, but yeah, the, there's a lot of solutions out there and honestly just find one that works well for what you need.

Another really good one that you don't even need necessarily a, to, to use a password manager to do is if you can just update the email on file to the right person and have them reset the password, then you never have to share credentials. Yeah. and so if you're using something that allows for that, not everything does, but most, things do where you can just log in, change the email on file, and then tell the other person, Hey, just reset the password.

You never share a password that way. it's great.

[00:23:43] Nathan Wrigley: that's great for a future where we're all using key par, pass keys instead of

[00:23:49] Chris David Miles: Yeah. And physical hardware keys are always great. Pass keys that are device specific are great. and I think one of the first plugins I usually install on WordPress sites is, two FA two FA is a good one.

yeah, And there is a canonical plugin for WordPress, called Two-Factor Authentication. and it's great. It has several, it supports all the major providers. It supports hard work keys, it supports TOTP. and it's terrific. anyways, enough about handing things off. the, so once you've gotten past that initial handoff, you think you have access to everything, and hopefully you do.

there's always a small chance that there's one or two accounts just that nobody knew existed that are just out there in the ether that you'll have to track down someday. But once you've got everything that you think you'll ever need, this is when it start, you'll wanna start to be really diligent about taking backups and maybe also implementing versioning.

so we'll talk a little bit about that. So backups, assuming you're already familiar with backups, but if you're not, it's just like making a copy of your site that you can then use to restore. So if something goes wrong, you can go back to a backup and say, make it like it was on December 4th, because I broke something on December 5th.

there's automatic backups that will just run from, like on a timer. but you can also implement what's called version control or versioning where. It's less about the time and more about the changes that are made. personally I prefer the versioning style. but it's less common most of the time.

It's, based on time. And so what you'll find is people will have, oh, I've got a daily backup, a weekly backup, and a monthly backup, or some pattern like that. sometimes the problems with that is it, ends up being a lot of overhead and a lot of hassle to figure out okay, I don't know exactly when this broke, so let me try this backup.

Yeah, it wasn't that one. Let me try this backup. wasn't that one either. and you end up having to just jump around, okay, this one definitely works, but man, it's a year old. Okay, can I get something closer? And you end up, playing the price is right. Game with backups, trying to get okay, am I over, am I under trying to get exactly to that point in time when you did it, when the, Sometimes what can be better? and you'll still have this problem a little bit, but it's, in my experience a lot better if you can implement it in more of a versioning style where either using something like Git where the, code is actually in, source control or, yeah. Jetpack backups is a really good solution Where It will take a backup every time there's a significant change to the site. There's, plans that are, and it'll actually keep an audit log of this user logged in and activated this plugin at this time. So we took a backup, this user logged in at, and they have different plans. Some are a little bit more comprehensive than others, but that is a.

I really, like Jetpack backups. It's also available as a standalone plugin now. Yeah. Some people don't like using the regular Jetpack plugin because they, have a different analytics and they're, like, I don't need a second one, or something like that. Or they have other reasons, but yeah, it's available as a standalone plugin or just get the Jetpack plugin.

and it's really great. And I, when I'm not using, like git or source control for a site and I need something that has an easy kind of GUI that I can just hand off to somebody, Jetpack backups is great because it will just have this audit log that you can just scroll through and say okay, yesterday the theme was changed and then six plugins were updated and a blog post was published.

And, okay, let me get back to this point in time. Yeah. And

[00:28:07] Nathan Wrigley: that user who claimed never to have updated a post, who did update a post, can totally can

[00:28:14] Chris David Miles: figure out who they are. Yeah. yeah, exactly. And it can be really helpful too. 'cause a lot of times stuff is automated. Yeah. Where maybe there's some, automated updates that happened and everyone correctly says I didn't make any changes.

and they didn't. Yeah. Yeah. and so you can log in and be like, oh, WordPress changed by itself. It's now on 6.4 point something. and now Gutenberg is a little different. Oh, okay. so things like that, it's really helpful to have that. but the one piece of advice I would give for backups more than anything else, so everybody listen up.

This applies to everybody. I. Test your ability to restore from backup early. that's one of the first things I always do, is take a backup, make a small innocuous change, and then test your ability to restore back to before that change. because your backups are only as useful as your ability to restore them.

Yeah. What you don't wanna do is be learning to use the restore functionality while the site is down, while the alarms are blazing and while your client is on the phone, very nervous that oh no, it's close to Black Friday and the site isn't working and you're now for the first time figuring out how this works.

You don't wanna be stuck in a situation where oh, apparently to restore, all it does is download a zip file. A sequel dump. Okay, now I gotta figure out what to do with this.

[00:30:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Into the command line. I go,

[00:30:02] Chris David Miles: yeah. I've never tried this before. Yeah. so you wanna make, so if it turns out that it's an enormous hassle and it takes 20 minutes to restore from backup, then your backups actually aren't that useful.

Or if it turns out, I've some horror stories where they find they actually can't restore, where oh, because of the way this was set up, I've never tried it before. Turns out I'm using some plugin to do backups for me and it doesn't have the right file permissions to restore from backup.

It's okay, then you effectively don't have a backup solution. Yeah. If you can't restore, or, if you can't restore quickly enough. If it takes you three hours to do a restore. it would've been just as fast to figure out the changes without using backups and to just

[00:30:50] Nathan Wrigley: divide them. Yeah. Do I like the idea of it's like a, fire drill, isn't it?

You just go through. Yes. It's exactly like a fire drill. Go through that process so that you can achieve it in 20 minutes, whereas it might, you maybe only do it once. But it takes you six hours and you've got a client literally, it's Black Friday, my site went down. What the heck?

Yes. That makes your life slightly unlivable. And I can feel the lawyers coming at that point. Precisely. So how precisely practice Precisely, yeah. have a dry run at

[00:31:17] Chris David Miles: it. Yeah. Yeah. And, it teaches you so much. It'll teach you how to do it. It'll teach you how long it takes. It'll teach you what to expect and oh, apparently this is easy enough.

I can do it right inside WP admin. So I could do this from my phone. or maybe, oh, okay. This requires CLI access, so I better be near a computer with good internet and or what, whatever it is. Yeah. You can go through it and you can realize. Hey, this is really working. And there have been times I've done it where it didn't work at all.

I've the store and Yep. And it was okay. Now we know on day one, my first task is finding a good backup solution. Yep.

[00:31:57] Nathan Wrigley: I've, I've had scenarios where, you just assume it works in a certain way because like it's a WordPress plugin and it just has, it, they've, it was written for the people who wrote it.

they do it in a way, and it's not quite what you are expecting, and you assume that you'll, I don't know, upload a file and then click a button and it turns out you've gotta enter some kind of password that was set weeks, or months, or years ago in order to decrypt that backup. And yeah, the list goes on.

Practice it. Yeah, you're right. Yeah.

[00:32:28] Chris David Miles: yeah. Plans for improvement short and long-term. And the reason I say plans for improvement, not plan, is that it's plural. There will be more than one. try to create like a short and long-term sort of plan and a backlog of changes. a to-do list of changes.

because one thing that's important to keep in mind generally whether you're inheriting a site or not, is that plans are subject to change. And especially with a site that you're inheriting, they're prone to surprises. They're prone to unexpected ownership. They're prone to, oh, this comes with something else that I didn't know I was signing up for.

and so be flexible. Acknowledge that change is constant and adapting plans is. Good. be flexible there. but do have a plan and do have in the short term, okay, we know that I want to add a web app firewall like CloudFlare, I'm just rattling off the things I personally like. we know that I'm gonna add a backup solution, so let's look at, Jetpack backups, or maybe I'll get everything into version control with gi.

and I've got this like short list of things that, okay, I'm gonna try and have these things done by the end of the week, and then longer term, let's take a look at the page builder. You're looking, you're using, or longer term, let's look at this affiliate plugin that you have that makes the site difficult to cache or something that might take longer.

so if you've got a kind of a short term plan and a longer term plan, you can continue to adjust those. and then if something throws a wrench in your plans, it's probably okay because that's typical for sites that you've inherited of oh, turns out it was a much bigger problem. I didn't even realize it was right under our noses and we've gotta deal with that instead.

And that went to the top of our list. so yeah, the as a quick side note, I just, I love putting, and I do this at work too, I love really corny stock images, so I always try to slip 'em into, I try to find the most over the top. Yeah. so this was my one over the top stock image this time. I like that.

But yeah, so the, If, and, for people just listening in, it's a person that has lassoed a graph as though it's alive and they're, they've lassoed it like a cowboy, but it's a graph that they've,

[00:35:09] Nathan Wrigley: they're lassoing it to make it, to make the chart go up. Yeah. Make things improve.

[00:35:14] Chris David Miles: Yeah.

So is very literal kind of analogy there. but yeah, this

[00:35:19] Nathan Wrigley: is probably the reason you've got the work, right? It's probably, it's highly unlikely that if the previous incumbent owner of the website, maintainer of the website was doing an effective job, it's highly unlikely that you're going been given that gig.

I guess this is the point of everything. What can you do to improve my website? let's

[00:35:38] Chris David Miles: find out. Exactly. So I broke this into a couple sections. we already talk about, like the initial audit that you, should do when you first get a site of okay, what's the hosting account?

What's this, what's that? those sorts of things. but also now that you've know what they are and you have access to them, now you can ask, okay, but should it be that, should we be with this hosting provider, or should we move it to, my favorite hosting provider because now I'm in charge of the site.

should we, it, does it make sense to be on the cheapest plan? Or actually now that we're getting a little bit of traffic, should we upgrade this to something more powerful? or whatever it is. Whether it's the domain or the, the CDN or backups or whatever it is, this is when you have a good chance to say, okay, you really might like this plugin.

I prefer using this plugin for these reasons. Why don't we talk about, changing over to this, or sometimes people are really loyal to page builders. Yeah. And sometimes those can even require refactoring a little bit and rebuilding a page or two. and so that's what I mean when I talk about auditing things this time around is now that you have them all in a spreadsheet or something and in your password manager now see if, should it be that, should we be using Constant contact or MailChimp?

Should we be using, this or that? is the hosting really meeting your needs? Is the domain registration appropriate for, what it is that you're using? A lot of people, some people prefer out of convenience to keep them. In the same place. Yeah. I've done it plenty of times, but a lot of people really insist that the domain name registration and the hosting are separate, so that in the event of either one, getting hit by an asteroid, you've at least diversified that a little bit.

Yep. And those are the sorts of things you might wanna examine and say, okay, what are we gonna do here? personally, I tend to, do a lot of things at Bluehost because I, I, work for Bluehost and it makes it really easy. Yeah. But like for, plenty of people that don't, I completely understand where some people might wanna say, no, I keep all of my domains over here at CloudFlare or something like that.

so yeah. so once you've gone through that audit, that's when you're starting to look for things to optimize. So you can actually go through your initial notes that you took where you said, I noticed they're using this weird plugin that I've never heard of. Or something like that. Or they're using this page builder that I'm not fond of or, something like that.

Or they're using a theme that doesn't work with blocks is, a red flag. Or they're using a theme that doesn't work with a PHP version that starts with eight. so sometimes that the, so you go through this and, find ways to like, okay, here's some obvious things that we should do, but it's also a good idea to go through the content and see if it's any good.

look at the, site map of the site. Hopefully there is one. And if there isn't, add that to your list. Yeah, give

[00:39:04] Nathan Wrigley: a site map. That's a good one to add. Quick win.

[00:39:06] Chris David Miles: yeah. Yeah. At a site map. get a, decent on-page. SEO plugin. I am of course gonna be a little biased because I work for the, company that I.

Is Yost, but I've been a customer of Yost for years and years before they were acquired. So yeah, the get a site map going, go through that site map and, figure out, okay, is this relevant? Is this up to date, is this comprehensive enough? do we need to create maybe a calendar for the content to like an editorial calendar to sometimes it can be too much of a task to say, Hey, let's.

Let's create a hundred blog posts. okay, let's create a hundred blog posts over the course of six months. Okay. That maybe is a little, that's more doable. So yeah, maybe create a calendar of here's when we're gonna start updating this, this. And depending on what the site is for, there might be evergreen content that like, oh, this hasn't changed in, 50 years and, we're selling pipe fittings or something.

And, this doesn't change often or something. And that's okay. But for anything that does, go ahead. Yeah, I was just gonna say, I

[00:40:21] Nathan Wrigley: always found this step really curious because it's so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that everybody knows what you know because you live and breathe websites and WordPress.

And you're probably addicted to the internet more than is healthy for you that aside, you just know a whole bunch of stuff because you are in this industry. And, it's always quite surprising, often how. How far back you've gotta remove yourself. Just The most basic of things that you think, oh, they definitely know that they don't know that.

they, might, but often they don't. And I always found there were so many quick wins in just little things, which I just new instinctively. I just, things like, oh, I don't know, the logo's too big and it's a stupid shape, or something like that, Yeah. Little, things. I, always just wrote out a list and usually I could get a dozen, two dozen things in the first few minutes.

Precisely. and then you become their best friend when you get to step three.

[00:41:29] Chris David Miles: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because the, when you, a lot of times, even if the previous. Person in charge of the site was aware of those sorts of things. Maybe it just wasn't a priority for that person where even just showing it to somebody else.

And there's plenty of times where I'll work on something and I'll show it to somebody else and they'll say, it's best practice to do this. And I'll be like, yeah, but I don't care. It's just because it's a different person, you'll be able to recognize things maybe the other person didn't.

[00:41:58] Nathan Wrigley: and you'll quickly pick up how technical they are, Yes. It, won't take you more than a minute to figure out, okay, they know all of this. Okay, we've gotta go, we've gotta go a little bit deeper now. yeah. But if they're oh, your first view, really obvious suggestions, that's great.

'cause there's a lot of work. Exactly. There's a lot of things

[00:42:17] Chris David Miles: to do. Yeah. yeah. go through the, content, the plugins, the themes. another thing that's really nice to be able to do, is perform some like AB testing where depending on whether or not a site is. selling things or has some sort of conversion of sales funnel or something like that.

Sometimes you can publish multiple copies and show them to a percentage of viewers and then test which one performs better. and there's a number of free tools that will let you do that. The paid one sometimes work a little bit better, but there you, can just go out and research, best way to ab test for WordPress and there's, you'll find some, several good things.

but the idea there is that, maybe there's a reason that something was done in a, in, kind of a weird way. and you, can, if you meet some resistance in, oh no, I really, like the logo this big, maybe you can ad test and demonstrate that actually you want the attention ratio of the site to, to be really tight and you want this call to action of sign up to be really.

Prominent not your homepage logo. And look, when we change it, it converts a little better. that sort of thing.

[00:43:36] Nathan Wrigley: Always remain calm.

[00:43:39] Chris David Miles: Yeah. The and then also look at the performance of the site. Look at how fast it loads, and look at the kind of scalability optimization to where you want it to load reasonably fast for every individual page load, but you're also want it to load fast enough when it's under high load, when you've got, say, black Friday or when you've got a situation where you end up on Oprah's book list or the front page of Reddit.

Or, I. The, you're featured on, Yahoo News or something? I don't know if people still read the

[00:44:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yahoo News. Yeah, I was gonna say, you get one extra hit there,

[00:44:27] Chris David Miles: but, yeah, like if, something happens where, oh, this is the most popular fly fishing forum, and they just, they just made a blog post and, they linked to my website unexpectedly, and I'm selling fly fishing lures like, it, it might be specific to your site, but if something happens and you need to quickly expand the capabilities of the website in terms of performance, are you in a position to do that?

and so look into that as a scenario of maybe you don't wanna be in a situation where, oh, it's not a question of backing up. It's a question of we've never gotten a million hits in 60 minutes before. We've never gotten a million hits in 60 seconds before. Are we ready for that? talk to your host and ask if you're ready for that.

Yeah. And

[00:45:18] Nathan Wrigley: also there's a whole bunch of people out in the wider community, the wider WordPress community who are, especially in terms of optimization, who are just amazingly clever with this kind of stuff. they can really can be there, whether you employ them or whether or not you just ask them for general tips and tricks.

You don't have to be the expert. You don't have to know everything about everything. That's one of the nice things about our community is that there's usually somebody there to lend a helping. Yeah. Especially

[00:45:44] Chris David Miles: with WordPress where Yeah. Exactly. You, can build off of the knowledge and expertise of other people.

Yeah. and it's, a great thing about community is it allows for this sort of specialization where you've got people that spend all of their time solving one problem. very well. And now everyone just knows that's the person you talk to for object cash. Yeah, so yeah, talking with stakeholders, so maybe you're, so stakeholders are just people that would be impacted by a change. So oftentimes this would be either the owner of a website or, if this is for a larger company, maybe it's the sales team, or maybe it's the, you've got a group of different people of oh, there's a, team of people on content, or this is the head of sales, or something like that.

But figure out who your stakeholders are. maybe it's just one person. Maybe it's just your client and it's their site. but figure out who that person or people are and work with them to prioritize your, to-do list where you can say, Hey, this is what I would suggest. This is what I would recommend.

Yeah. But work with them and make sure that they're happy with your to-do list, because they might say actually, I think it's really important that you make this website faster sooner than anything else that you do. Yeah. You might have to negotiate a little bit and say, I agree with you with the only exception being we really need to solve this backup problem today, because I noticed the backup and restore function doesn't work, and I don't think we should do anything else until we solve that.

But, as soon as that's solved, yeah, let's make the website faster. And so maybe you'll have to negotiate a little bit. But it's important that you're aligned more than anything, that you all agree that you walk outta that with a virtual handshake agreeing that yes, this is the list.

And keep in mind too, that like plans are gonna change so you don't necessarily need to. Rigidly outline and agree on everything in the list, but agree to the top upper part of the list generally, and you'll be okay. Keeping in mind that the further down the list you go, the more likely it is to change before you get there.

don't, be too upset if, those things change. But yeah, talk with your stakeholders. Make sure that they understand things, especially given that they might have good advice for you. You might talk to the sales manager of the company and find out, oh yeah, this silly affiliate system has never worked and we've never been happy with it, and the previous website person could never get it working, right?

You're like, oh, terrific, because neither can I, so let's use something else.

[00:48:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Let's

[00:48:39] Chris David Miles: begin again. Yeah. And, maybe, or maybe they'll bring you a problem you didn't even realize was there. And say, oh yeah, you know what? Whenever I come in through these links, the website looks funny. And you're like, whoa, I didn't even realize these were here.

How did, okay, this is a completely different website, but on a subdomain. Okay, interesting. it's

[00:49:00] Nathan Wrigley: interesting, isn't it? Like conversation is the answer to everything. Yeah. if you are the kind of person that hates the phone or hates doing in-person meetings, I feel your pain. And I know that I know how difficult that stuff can be, but if you can get over that hump and you can get on the phone and you can speak to people, I know emails fine and it works, but if you can.

Do the phone call, do the zoom call regularly. Oh, man. It's, such a time saver. Yes. People can say in two minutes what you could spend a week figuring out via email.

[00:49:36] Chris David Miles: Yeah. and, and it just builds trust too. You build a

[00:49:38] Nathan Wrigley: rapport, build trust, you become the guy, the, it's just the person.

[00:49:43] Chris David Miles: Yeah, E especially when it comes to these sometimes pet peeve items of a client where they're like, I don't know how important it is, but I noticed that this little thing over here doesn't quite work. And, I don't know if that matters too much, but if, that's probably not something that they would add to an email.

Because they're gonna be thinking like, okay, what's actually important? But if you can get regular calls and they, they let their guard down a little bit with you, then they'll be able to say, here's a small thing I'd like you to change and then you can do it. And Oh yeah, that would take me five minutes.

Yeah. Easy. Okay. One

[00:50:18] Nathan Wrigley: of the, one of the things that I did, if I, if people were on some sort of retainer with me, I would just, I would make an hour every week where we just chat and hopefully they'd come with a list of things to, to talk about. And I would say just write 'em all down. Just put 'em on a, put 'em on a page in your, in your notebook somewhere, or write it in a Google Doc and we'll just go through 'em all.

And, typically you'd get most of those things knocked off and everybody feels good. One hour a week doesn't take lots. Yeah.

[00:50:46] Chris David Miles: Yeah. yeah. so in terms of plans for improvement, you've got the audit that you do of, Hey, now I know what the accounts are, but. Should they be that you've got a list of things you're gonna do, you've got a short list of what you think you're gonna do immediately on a longer list of things you wanna do longer term, and then go over that list and prioritize it with the people that can help you make that decision.

probably the person who's paying you. and then two more quick sessions before the end of the presentation. This is staging and deployment. So if it's a brand new website, you have the benefit of something like a Coming Soon page where you can put up a page that the whole world can see that says, Hey, this website is coming soon and it's under construction.

while you make whatever changes you can make. But usually if you're inheriting a site, it's probably live. It's probably. Up on the internet, getting traffic, whatever, making sales, doing whatever it needs to do may be, maybe not well, but it's probably live. So you don't always have that benefit, but you can get that benefit with staging.

And maybe some of the listeners are already familiar with staging, but for those who aren't staging is just, imagine making a copy of your website and then you can mess around with the copy instead of the real thing without worrying about messing up the real thing. And so you can try really drastic changes, let's try a completely different theme and change PHP versions and also get rid of all the plugins I don't like, and, let, you can, go wild with it without worrying about.

Breaking anything. 'cause if it breaks, all you've broken is this kind of fake copy that you've made of the site. and so there's plugins that you can use. most hosting providers will provide you with some sort of staging solution because it's oftentimes a very similar technical problem to solve as like backups.

Yeah. Yeah. 'cause you're making a copy of a site and making changes to the copy. And that's the same thing as a backup. And it's the same thing as migration. they're different use cases, but that's usually why hosting companies will offer those three things for free is if they've solved any one of them, they've solved 90% of the other two.

Yeah. So if they can do a backup, they can probably figure out staging too, and probably figure out migration too. So talk to your hosting provider, see if they have a staging solution. If they don't, you can just go find a plugin that works really well or find a hosting provider that does. but yeah, there's some, and sometimes you wanna be picky about it and sometimes, oh, they offer a staging solution, but I really, WP Stagecoach or something, Maybe you really like some specific plugin, but the, or sometimes people prefer making a copy on their computer and pulling up, just like a local environment of oh, this isn't on the internet at all. It only runs on my computer. and, I can make changes a lot faster, and if you're writing a lot of code, sometimes that's easier.

but the idea being that if you've got another copy of it, make whatever wild changes you want and then you can review that hopefully with your stakeholders and say, Hey, here's a complete redesign of the site, using a different site builder. And this is the thing I've done actually several times with Wonder Blocks, where, there's until very, recently in WordPress that it wasn't great.

Making content wasn't great in terms of what you had available out of the box for designing visually. So you, had a few options you could design in like Figma or in some mockup tool and then translate that to code. You could use a page builder and a lot of 'em are pretty good. Elementor, beaver Builder, I've never used Divvy, but a lot of it's extremely popular.

That'd be very popular. Yeah. Yeah. so a lot of people must enjoy it. so like some of those exist and they're filling a very real need, but now that WordPress core is making strides towards making that a lot better, a lot of times you can just create, recreate an existing site just using WordPress core blocks.

And I, and Wonder Blocks that Bluehost has, it's actually technically not new blocks. Most of the time it's actually just using patterns created, using core blocks so that you don't have to add a whole bunch of extra plugins to get it to work. Nice. And so that, if you want to, copy or change or anything else that you don't have to learn a new interface that the, paragraphs and the, the rows and the columns and everything else are just what's in core and the sections and the synced patterns and all of those things are just what's in core.

And so there's actually been plenty of times where even when we were developing Wonder Blocks where we would approach a customer and say, Hey, we noticed that you're using such and such site builder for your site. Your site looks great, but would you be willing and, for, to have us redesign it for you or recreate it just using regular WordPress blocks, because it would probably load faster and it would probably be a little bit easier to work on in the future.

I. And another thing that's fun is a lot of times you'll find when you do, like I talked about doing an SEO audit before, people will sometimes build things in like image programs where like they'll go to Canva. Yeah. And they'll, have, and I've seen this so many times with like restaurants and things where like they'll make this beautiful graphic in Canva of their menu.

And it's that's terrific. Yeah. Nobody can read that. Yeah. That, that, that doesn't have sight. So like it's an accessibility problem in two ways. People that are using screen readers probably can't see it and Google and other search engines probably can't see it. they can see that it's a picture and that's it.

And, the alt text. But, there's been plenty of times when we've recreated patterns that were made in Canva. Just using Wonder Blocks in five

[00:57:22] Nathan Wrigley: minutes. Yeah. Core Blocks is, just doing, it's getting so much better. It's getting really, yeah. It's, you can really get, it's really great.

Very, close to almost a Pixel Perfect design these days.

[00:57:32] Chris David Miles: And, especially now too, because, core doesn't really have animations yet. wonder Blocks does, but Core doesn't really have animations yet. And so there's a few things people are still using other tools for and it's totally fine, but just make sure that when you do that, like those are still legible with a screen reader and those are still legible to Google because if not, well, it almost doesn't matter if it's really pretty, you can't read an Instagram post with a screen reader.

yeah, It's not gonna do you any good. So yeah, the point being make a staging copy of your site and then you can make drastic changes where you completely change all of the plugins if you want. And it won't impact the real site until you're ready to actually deploy. and when you actually deploy, that's when, that's another one of those things that you'll wanna make sure is well tested before you try it.

So just like you did with the backups where you say, I'm gonna make one small change that doesn't matter, and then do a backup to, before that one small change, you wanna do the same thing with staging and say, I'm gonna make one small change that doesn't matter in my staging site, and then deploy that to production.

Because even if you're used to it, if it's a new site, you might find that, oh, okay, it's a little different on this type of hosting provider that I've never used before. Or it's a little different over here or there or something. So that's where you'll wanna. Test it out so that the first time you do it, you're not also figuring out, oh, why is this plugin behaving differently in staging versus production?

and, things like that. you'll, wanna have ruled that out.

[00:59:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And if, just like we said before, having a dry run, having a fire drill. If you, if you practice, practice is the wrong word, but if you figure out what to press, which buttons to press to get your staging environment back that you created, but also to push it, the staging back to live it, it's, it becomes a bit, just the way that you do it.

if you gonna make a Yeah. A change. If add a plug into your site and you're not entirely sure whether it'll break things or not work on the basis that it will break things, make a staging environment, try it on there, you'll know right away. Yeah. And, and then you can push that, or you can just go back to the original site and add it in there.

Or you can just make the staging environment live if you wish. Yeah. Nice. Exactly.

[01:00:03] Chris David Miles: And, as a side note, yeah, sometimes the most common way to do it, if you find that pushing to production is a tricky thing is just to redo what you did on the real side. Yeah. Just do it again. Yeah, And sometimes people actually prefer that, that oh, now that I know just the few things I'm gonna make, and I'm, on the staging side, installed a hundred plugins and then whittled it down to just the ones I needed.

Okay. I don't wanna push all of this junk up here. Let me just recreate the few things I liked. Yeah. yeah. that's a good point. Thank you. And then the very last thing, just the last thought I'll leave you with is that, It might be a little overwhelming if it's your first time taking over a website from somebody else.

But if you're doing it in WordPress, know that there is a network of people that can help you. There's WordPress forums. There is a million people out there that, there's actually hundreds of millions of sites, so there's more than a million, but there's, a lot, of people out there that know WordPress that can help you.

And there's a whole community of things. You're listening to a really good resource right now, WP builds. Yay. So there's, yeah, there's a lot of resources out there. You can do it, it's a lot all at once, and so it can be overwhelming. But yeah, make a checklist, handle things one at a time and don't be afraid to ask for help.

And it's, okay to learn as you go, and it's okay to be a little bit nervous. That just means that you care about doing a good job and that's a good thing.

[01:01:45] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. And in the immortal words of Douglas Adams, don't panic.

[01:01:51] Chris David Miles: Don't panic. Yeah. Yeah. That's good.

[01:01:53] Nathan Wrigley: 42. thank you Chris. That was really interesting.

Really appreciate that. hopefully if you've never done that kind of thing before, you can always reach out to Chris. You can always reach out to the team at Bluehost. You can always reach out to your friends companions and anybody else that you find online, anywhere to do with WordPress.

They can help you with this sort of stuff. But it is a bit of a males strum. The first time you do it, there is a lot, there's a lot of moving parts. You'll probably miss things the first time and you can just add it in to your little checklist of the things that you need to do. The second time. So yeah, thank you twice over to Chris.

He joined us the, first webinar that we did all about, wonder Blocks and Wonder Suite and Wonder Start and all of that. We'll be joined next week by Jocelyn who'll be telling us. I'll leave that until next week. I know, but, it's gonna be something about helping, your website visitors to understand what's going on and maybe a little bit of sprinkling of AI in there as well.

Chris, that'll be fun. Really appreciate it. Hopefully I will catch you at some point at a real world event, somewhere or other that would be rather nice. But yeah, thank you for joining us twice. Take care. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Take it easy, Chris. Bye-Bye bye-Bye.