relative: can you help me with my website?
me: ok, what do you need?
them: okay, i have this wordpress homepage that someone made for me and actually, when you go to my image gallery, i only want a simple "back" button that leads to the main page. but i cannot add it via wordpress functionality.
me: okay, i'll make you this button in under 10 minutes, given it doesn't require any fancy design. but i have no experience with messing with wordpress so far... let me check what their templates look like
(after 1 hour): wtf is this mess 😭

...since they only had their production website, i didn't dare to change anything and told them they best hire that dev again 🙈

Your biggest mistake was accepting their request. But good you didn't dive further and told them no.

So many unqualified out there

There is nothing to be afraid of. Next time add this website to a GIT repo so you would have a backup and dont be afraid of editing.

I'd guess they'd be served better with a static website anyway. Turdpress just sucks.

As for the templates - the fact that they can even have security holes already tells you how fucked up the architecture is.

Btw., a button would be wrong anyway because the anchor tag is for navigating across pages. Plus that the visitor may not come via the main page, but via a bookmark or search engine.

@AnxiousADHDGuy okay, maybe i wasn't completely honest here.^^ not only i didn't dare, also i just didn't want to, since i knew i would have to spend a greater amount of time than i was willing to.
backing up the site on github or somewhere else doesn't solve the problem that i only have the production environment for testing, so first i would have to set up a testing environment where i can play around with wordpress and try to modify templates. and since i visited my relative's home and hadn't brought a laptop or something, i would've had to set up dev environment on their PC (which was a mac, btw シ)
and all for this stupid button which was a bit redundant anyway. it would be more efficient to ask the guy who set up the site in the first place, since he would probably know exactly what to do (i assume)

@Fast-Nop i mean, the back button could as well have a static link to the main page, not via window.history.back(). but that would also be redundant in most cases..

@soull00t Plus that the whole idea suggests that there is a general problem with the main navigation of the website because a proper navigation menu would already include a "home" link.

Getting that right, especially so that it's also responsive, isn't easy and requires some forethought with regard to the whole website information architecture.

@green-portal I mean what do people want custom websites for anyway now? Portfolio site for a non dev: wix, craft e-commerce: no website just start on Etsy. If you have actual profits to spend on a site that’s different. E-commerce store: Shopify, squarespace, woo commerce (for godsake dont use square e-commerce, different from squarespace) and most other things have some way to point and click get started on an established site.

@jeeper gotta reinvent the wheel every time