Hello all! This might be a long-ish read but I want to give as much context as possible for this situation I'm in. I am an IT consultant for a nonprofit and was tasked with assisting with implementing a plugin into their existing WP site. It's currently hosted on WP Engine.

I want to start out by stating this: I am a technical consultant who specializes in IT troubleshooting, system administration, networking, security and tailor fit technical solutions. I am a generalist who is adept in all aspects of tech but I am by no means a WordPress dev. This consultant role for this nonprofit is the first time I had actually had to learn WordPress and how certain things work through WP Admin. I told my client directly that I could assist with technical implementations but emphasized that I do not design websites for a living and that this would be a best efforts sort of thing.

Some history: The nonprofit had apparently called on a design company to design their primary website. They seemed to have designed the layout, structure and architecture as a custom WordPress theme that, from what I could understand, had lines of code in it's CSS sheet that tells certain plugins to do certain things related to site/element layouts. I don't know the exact timeline of events but the nonprofit no longer works with the original design company and needed to call on ANOTHER design company to fix the website layout when critical layout elements broke down apparently. The second company now is in the picture on a routine maintenance contract (I believe they migrated their site to WPEngine, and they run monthly maintenance by updating outdated plugins and patching security vulnerabilities) but for anything site-design related, they charge by the hour or by the project from my understanding.

Currently the stylistic layout of the site is all tied to the custom theme I mentioned above. There is a base/parent theme and a child theme. The child theme is the one that is currently active for the site. Being technically adept, I am able to use the Theme Editor to modify certain texts/attributes through the live WordPress site and can use SFTP to download the themes/create a new child theme if I wanted to.

Here's the problem: Nobody at this nonprofit is very technical and nobody knows how the website works in WordPress on a technical level. They have stated on several occasions that they feel extremely limited when it comes to the design elements of the site and they definitely don't know how to grab the themes off SFTP and modify it on a site dev level. On top of this: the plugin I am trying to implement requires a "global header" that allows a user to sign in through a third party platform (through API) and use it to purchase things directly through the site instead of linking to the platform via a URL link but the active theme seemingly is not allowing me to add this header or modify any of the design elements on global site things like headers, footers etc.

Here's where I could use some advice: The plugin required that we also activate and license Elementor Pro so we can control more of the design elements of the site when we implement the plugin. Playing around with Elementor it seems easier for non-technical people to modify certain aspects of the layout. In thinking of a future for the nonprofit to be able to edit design related aspects of their site without my involvement, I thought it might be worth it call on the design company to recreate the theme the site uses through Elementor Pro so that if a member of the nonprofit has to change something in the future then it is much, much more accessible... so long as they keep paying for the Elementor Pro yearly subscription that is lol.

Is this a good idea? Like I said, I am trying to think of something for the long term for this client given that they have no in-house WordPress devs or technical folk.

Thank you for reading and thanks in advance to anyone who can offer some insight here!