A WordPress project on fire (hacked, inherited from a developer who disappeared, stalled mid-build, or just broken) needs the same discipline regardless of which situation it is: assess before touching anything, stabilize, remediate whatever’s actually wrong, then decide repair or rebuild.
What do you do first when a WordPress project is broken?
Assess before you touch anything, and don’t delete evidence while you’re figuring out what happened, especially if the site was hacked. Stabilize next: stop active damage without destroying the information you’ll need to understand what actually went wrong and fix it correctly instead of guessing.
Inheriting a broken or legacy site
Taking over a build you didn’t create starts with access (hosting, domain, admin), then an honest audit of what’s actually there: outdated software, undocumented custom code, and whatever’s quietly broken underneath.
See inheriting a broken or legacy WordPress site for what to check first.
Fixing a hacked site
Contain, investigate, then clean, in that order. Deleting suspicious files before understanding how the attacker got in just means the same entry point is still open once you’re done.
See fixing a hacked WordPress site for the professional remediation path.
Repair vs rebuild
Repair when the foundation is sound and the damage is contained. Rebuild when the foundation itself, the architecture, the code debt, the security posture, is what’s actually broken.
See WordPress repair vs rebuild for how to make that call honestly.
Rescuing a stalled project
When a build stalls or a previous team walks away, the first job is honest triage: what’s done, what’s worth keeping, and what a real path to finished actually looks like.
See rescuing a stalled WordPress project for that triage process.
Keeping it stable after
A rescue that isn’t followed by real maintenance just resets the clock until the next incident. Hardening, monitoring, and backups are what keep a recovered site recovered.
See keeping a WordPress site stable after a rescue for what that ongoing discipline looks like.
How 84EM runs a rescue
Every rescue follows the same sequence: assess honestly, stabilize without destroying evidence, remediate what’s actually wrong, then repair or rebuild based on what the assessment actually found, not a default answer picked in advance. See project rescue services to talk about what’s happening with your project.
