WordPress support.
Overview
Sometimes you do not need a monthly plan. You need the site working again today.
A plugin update took the site down. The contact form stopped sending and nobody noticed for a week. Google flagged the site as hacked. An editor cannot log in. The checkout throws an error on the last step, for some customers, and nobody can say how many.
These are the jobs we pick up one at a time, with no retainer and no long conversation first. You do not have to have a relationship with us to send one.
How it actually goes
Four of the ones we see most. Pick whichever is nearest to your situation and watch it play out.
Two things worth noticing in all four. We work on a copy first wherever it is possible, so the fix is tested before it touches anything your customers can see. And the job does not end when the site works, because in three of those four the fault was a symptom of something structural, and you are owed that explanation rather than just the repair.
What we take on
Broken now
- White screens, fatal errors and failed updates
- Plugin and theme conflicts after an update
- Login, permission and user-role problems
- Checkout and payment errors on WooCommerce
- Forms that stopped sending, or email landing in spam
- Sites that have slowed to a crawl with no obvious cause
Worse than broken
- Hacked sites: clean-up, and finding how they got in
- Search engine warnings and blocklisted domains
- Sites restored after a failed migration or a bad backup
- A site locked away by a developer nobody can reach any more
- Hosting that has suspended the account and will not say why
- A database that somebody has already tried to fix
What to send
You do not need to diagnose it. That is the job. But four things make the first hour faster, and the first hour is usually where the money goes.
The site address. What you were doing just before it started, even if it seems unrelated, especially if it seems unrelated. The exact error text or a screenshot, rather than a description of it. And who else has access, because “nobody has touched it” turns out to be untrue more often than anyone expects.
If you have hosting or WordPress logins to hand, that helps. If you have lost them, say so, because recovering access is a normal part of this work rather than an embarrassment.
What it costs
Hourly for anything exploratory, because quoting a fixed price to diagnose an unknown fault means either padding it or guessing.
Once we know what is wrong, you get a fixed quote before the repair starts, and you can stop there. Plenty of people take the diagnosis and hand it to their own developer, and that is a completely reasonable thing to do with it.
Emergency work on a site that is down gets picked up first. We will be straight about this: we are a small team, not a 24-hour operation, and we would rather tell you when we can realistically start than promise an hour we cannot hold.
After the fire is out
We will tell you honestly whether the problem was a one-off or a symptom.
If it was a symptom, ongoing management costs less than the next emergency, and we will say so once without turning it into a sales conversation. If it was genuinely a one-off, we will say that too, and you carry on as you were.
Most emergencies we clean up were preventable. Here is the checklistQuestions we get asked
How quickly can you start?
A site that is down gets looked at first, usually the same working day. We will tell you when we can realistically start rather than saying yes and leaving you wondering. If we cannot get to it fast enough to be useful, we will say that, because a slow yes is worse than a quick no when your site is offline.
Do we have to sign up for anything?
No. One job, one invoice. We would rather you came back because the first job went well than because you were tied in.
Can you work on a site you did not build?
That is most of this work. We will usually be reading somebody else’s code, and we will not make a performance of criticising it. What matters is finding the fault, not the archaeology.
What if you cannot fix it?
It happens, occasionally, usually where a site was built on something abandoned or where a previous fix has made things worse. You will hear that early rather than after a week of billable hours, along with what we think the realistic options are, even when one of those options is not us.
The site is hacked. Should we take it offline first?
Only if it is actively harming visitors, for example serving malware or redirecting to a scam. Otherwise leave it exactly as it is and do not start deleting files. The state it is in right now is the evidence of how it happened, and destroying that means the same thing will happen again in a month.
Will you explain what went wrong?
In plain English, every time, and in writing if it is worth writing down. A fix you do not understand is a fix you cannot learn anything from, and most of these faults have a lesson in them that is worth more than the repair.