Ask HN: Sharing a shared hosting account with non-technical clients

I have a few clients who run a separate "marketing" site on shared hosting like Go Daddy or Hostgator. For the "product" site there are great tools for tracking changes and deploying, e.g. git, pull requests, CI servers, capistrano, chef, war files, etc. But what about the shared hosting account? Mostly this is managed by the client themselves via an FTP GUI and Wordpress, but sometimes I'm asked to change something. I'm curious how people deal with this? How do you "scale down"? I can't force these people to use git. My goals are:

- get the whole thing backed up periodically

- track changes

- easily pull/push between my own development copy and production

How are other people handling this?