Your site is yours. You’re always welcome to work on it yourself, and plenty of my clients do. Adding posts, editing pages, updating products, managing your email list… that’s all yours to do whenever you want.
Some changes, though, can quietly take down a whole site, a checkout or a course. I’ve seen all of these happen:
- A code snippet pasted in that took the site offline
- A menu deleted by accident, with no way to bring it back except a restore
- A setting renamed that made dozens of pages vanish
- A live email automation edited mid-campaign, leaving hundreds of subscribers stuck
- A theme color changed that made the checkout text invisible
None of these were careless. They’re just easy mistakes to make. So here’s a simple guide.
Go Ahead, No Need To Ask
- Writing and editing posts and pages
- Adding and editing products, prices and coupons
- Managing your email list, tags and newsletters
- Uploading images and media
- Answering comments, managing orders and members
Check With Me First
- Adding code snippets or editing theme files
- Installing new plugins, or deactivating ones you’re not sure about
- Changing site-wide settings: theme colors and fonts, permalinks, custom post types, menus that appear everywhere
- Editing anything that’s live and running: a checkout, an active sales funnel, an email automation people are partway through, membership rules
- Server-level things: caching, DNS, anything in your hosting
You don’t need permission. It’s your site. But a quick “I’m about to do X” in Basecamp lets me warn you about anything that might bite, or take a backup first.
Using AI Tools On Your Site
ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and the rest are genuinely useful. I use AI in my own work too. But on a live website, they come with a catch: an AI tool doesn’t know how YOUR site is set up. It knows how WordPress sites work in general. So it’ll confidently tell you to turn off something your site depends on, add DNS records that conflict with the ones already there, or paste in code that worked somewhere else.
So:
- Treat an AI diagnosis as a lead, not a verdict. If ChatGPT says your DNS is wrong or a plugin needs disabling, send me what it said before acting on it. I’ll tell you whether it’s right for your site.
- Don’t paste AI-written code into your site directly. Send it to me and I’ll review it and add it the safe way.
- Don’t give AI tools or AI plugins admin access to your site without talking to me first. Connecting an AI to your site with an application password or a new plugin opens a door, and I want to know what’s coming through it.
- AI-written bug reports are welcome. If AI helped you pin down a problem, paste its summary into your to-do. Just add, in your own words, what you were doing and what you saw.
When Something Breaks
It happens. Don’t panic, and don’t keep trying fixes on top of fixes. That usually makes it harder to untangle.
- Stop. Leave things as they are.
- Tell me in Basecamp what you changed just before it broke. Mark it urgent if the site or checkout is down.
- I’ll fix it, or restore the affected piece from a backup. See Backups, Restores and Staging Sites.
Honestly, “I changed X and then Y broke” is the most useful sentence you can send me. No judgment. I’d much rather hear it straight than spend an hour working out what happened.