You inherited a WordPress site and nobody left you the logins

The honest read on this search

“wordpress web design vancouver” draws about 110 searches a month and Google reports no advertiser cost against it at all. It is the thinnest term we have built a page around. For scale, the same city not naming a platform:

Measured, not estimated. A dash means no cost-per-click benchmark exists. Our difficulty index puts the phrase at 93 out of 100 — a flag, not a verified page-one read.

About one searcher in twelve names the platform, and rarely because they chose it. This page is for one reader: someone already running WordPress who did not pick it. Starting fresh? Our website development page is the better read.

What an inherited WordPress site usually looks like

The pattern barely varies. The host is pinned to an old PHP version because a current one white-screens the theme. The theme is premium and its licence lapsed, so the update button is decorative. Four of the twenty-odd plugins have not been touched by their authors since 2019. Template files were edited directly instead of through a child theme, so updating erases the work — the real reason nobody dares press it. Your login is an Editor, not an Administrator. And often enough the contact form delivers to a mailbox nobody has opened in years.

Getting ownership back, before anything else

Design comes later. The first session is an account list, worked until every line carries your name: the registrar and the registrant contact on file; DNS, often at a different company; the hosting account and whose card renews it; a true Administrator login; database and SFTP credentials; licence keys for every paid theme and plugin; Google Business Profile, Analytics and Search Console; the mailbox your enquiries route through; and any CDN sitting in front.

This part wants two people at one table. Recovery emails land on your phone, codes expire in ten minutes, and several registrars will only speak to the registered contact. We are in Burnaby, so we do it in person across Vancouver, the North Shore and the Tri-Cities.

Salvage, replace, or leave the platform behind

Salvage. Your writing, your photography, your address structure and the links pointing at it, the reviews on your Business Profile. Throwing those away is the most expensive mistake in a rebuild.

Replace. Dead-licence themes, pirated plugin copies, anything abandoned upstream, code edited straight into a parent theme. None of it can be maintained safely.

Leave alone. Sometimes the site is dated but sound and your money does more elsewhere. We say so, even though it is the smaller invoice.

Leaving WordPress is right in three cases: the paid theme is unobtainable and the layout depends on it; a page builder has stored your content as its own shortcodes, unreadable without the plugin that trapped it; or the site does three simple things that no longer need a database.

Work you can open and browse

Live sites, not mockups. Three where the owner runs it day to day — which is the point.

Vancouver questions, answered straight