Having trouble with taking over old WordPress site

Avatar
  • Answered
Hi I am a graphic designer that has began coding. I am running into issues with a job as I am not familiar with taking over an old site. The site was build in Wordpress and I have updated the DNS and MX records as per advice from the old developer. He isn't giving up the logins for cpanel or wordpress - I've created the new login for cpanel (something I'm new to) and have installed wp in a subdirectory - but when I get to http://www.pearlwhitedental.co.uk/dir/wp-admin/ I can't see anywhere to log in. Am I missing something?

I am still tracking down the log in for the registrar as this domain was purchased 7 years ago and no one thought to write it down. The old developer is pointing the nameservers to InMotion for me and has asked for a ISP TAG which I think I get from the old host, which I will need to wait for the client on.

Any advice is much welcome - I thought this would be a little more straightforward but keep running into issues!
Avatar
christopherm
Hello kaycochrane, Thank you for your questions about WordPress and taking over an older site. Before starting to change anything make sure to take a backup of everything. It looks like the theme may have been heavily self-coded, and the login page could have been coded to use a different template. You can try renaming the functions.php file in the theme folder (but don't erase it), or, a safer option would be switching to a default WordPress theme to get logged into the admin menu. Best, Christopher M.