Every freelancer knows the email: “Our old developer is no longer available. Can you take over our website?” The site is Divi, the license is in the old developer’s account, there is no documentation, and the pages were built four different ways across five years by at least three people, one of whom loved nesting rows inside rows.
The tempting quote is a rebuild. Sometimes that is right. But quoting a rebuild before you know what is actually there is guessing with the client’s money — and most inherited sites turn out to be twenty percent genuinely broken, eighty percent fine-but-scruffy. The rescue sequence below tells you which twenty percent, in about an hour.
Hour one: inventory the inherited Divi site
First, know what you have. Divi and WordPress versions, active plugins, how many pages, whether the header and footer live in the Theme Builder or in some legacy arrangement. Divi Autopilot’s site-context reader pulls this in one call, and the rescue scan then classifies up to 300 pages into the categories that decide your quote:
- Clean Divi 5 pages — fine, leave them alone.
- Divi 4 shortcode pages — working today, but living on borrowed rendering; plan conversions.
- Gutenberg or classic content — not a problem, just a different toolchain.
- Broken builder meta — the real landmines: pages whose builder flags and content disagree.
- Shortcodes from removed plugins — currently rendering as literal bracket text to visitors. These are your day-one fixes.
The scan returns an ordered fix plan — what is urgent, what can wait, what is cosmetic. That plan is your scope document. Send it to the client instead of a shrug.
Day one: baseline everything
Before you change a single module, run the full audit suite — QA, accessibility, performance, SEO, legal. Two reasons. First, it finds the problems you would otherwise discover one client email at a time. Second, it timestamps the site’s condition before you touched it. When something turns out to have been broken for two years, you want the receipt that says “pre-existing.”
Week one: quick wins, journaled
Inherited sites reliably yield a fat stack of mechanical fixes: oversized images, missing alt text, broken heading order, absent meta descriptions. The fixers clear these in bulk — every change journaled, every fix individually undoable, which matters on a site where you do not yet know what is intentional.
Then re-run the audits. The diff — fixed, introduced, persisting — becomes your first progress report, and the Autopilot Site Score gives the client one number that moved in the right direction during week one. Clients fund week two when week one has a number.
Only then: decide what actually gets rebuilt
With the inventory, the baseline and the quick wins done, the rebuild conversation changes shape. It is no longer “this old site is scary, let’s start over” — it is “these nine pages have broken builder meta and predate your current brand; here is what rebuilding just those costs.” Smaller quote, faster yes, and the site got measurably better before the first invoice.
If you hand the client anything, hand them a white-label health report with your name on it — the before/after diff does the selling for you.
Next inherited site, run the sequence: the rescue scan and audits are part of Divi Autopilot — the Agency plan covers 20 sites for $299/year, which is roughly one hour of the archaeology it replaces.