Website care & repair
WordPress Repair and Rescue
Broken after an update? Inherited a site nobody can explain? We find out what actually went wrong before we change anything, rehearse the fix on a copy of your site, and repair the live site without losing your data.
A recent rescue · Loyalist Business Association
A member directory that was erasing itself
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Members shown correctly | 3 of 39 | 39 of 39 |
| Renewal dates matching records | 0 | 39 of 39 |
| Directory listings kept | At risk | 286 of 286 |
| Site email | Failing | Working |
Sound familiar?
What We Fix
01
Broken After an Update
A plugin, theme or WordPress update ran, and now pages, search or forms misbehave. Sometimes it fails at once. Sometimes it erodes quietly over weeks.
02
Changes That Won't Stick
You save a setting, it looks right, and minutes later it has reverted. Something in the background is overwriting your work, and it can be found.
03
Email That Stopped Sending
Contact forms, password resets and reminders go nowhere, or newsletters land in spam. We move sending to a service you own and authenticate your domain.
04
A Developer Who Left
You inherited a site nobody documented, with accounts registered to people who have moved on. We map what is there and move it into your name.
05
Missing or Overwritten Data
Listings, members, products or dates gone or wrong. We recover what we can from backups and your own records, then check every number.
06
A Site Too Fragile to Touch
No backups, no test copy, and every update feels like a gamble. We take verified backups before each change and test on a staging copy first.
Our process
How We Repair a Site
Guessing is how a site gets broken twice. Every step below comes from our most recent rescue.
- 01
Diagnose before we touch anything
We measure what the site is actually doing, recover any old backups and work out when and why it broke. On our last rescue we found the root cause from the site's public data before we even had a login.
- 02
Check what a rollback brings back
Restoring an old backup can undo new damage and bring old faults back with it. We compare before choosing, then fix the foundations first: email, forms and accounts in your name.
- 03
Rehearse every fix on a copy
Each fix runs first on a staging copy of your site. We take and check backups before every change, and switch off outgoing email on the copy so nobody gets a message by accident.
- 04
Prove the fix holds
Some faults take weeks to show. We force background jobs to run and compare snapshots of your data day by day until nothing changes that we cannot explain.
- 05
Replay it on the live site
We never copy staging over your live site. We replay the proven steps one at a time, with the expected results and a rollback plan written down first.
- 06
Leave a plain-language guide
You get a care guide that says what is safe to edit and what to avoid, plus a runbook the next person can follow.
Recent rescue · WordPress
A Member Directory That Was Erasing Itself
The Loyalist Business Association, a volunteer-run non-profit in Loyalist Township, Ontario, lists 286 local businesses, with paying members featured at the top. After a routine upgrade of its directory plugin, everything looked fine. Then, over the following weeks, members started dropping back to free listings minutes after being featured, renewal dates were overwritten and the site stopped sending email.
We traced it to a bug in the plugin's new version: a background task that kept resetting members it did not recognize. On our staging copy, the vendor's recommended upgrade moved 245 of the 286 listings to the trash. We caught it, reworked the sequence, watched the repaired copy for three days, and only then replayed the fix on the live site.
Along the way we moved the site's email to a service the association owns, which unblocked 31 member accounts stuck waiting for verification emails, and rebuilt the contact form with nothing left to expire.
- Saved from a faulty vendor upgrade we caught on staging
- 245 listings
- Total effort for the whole directory repair
- 16 hours
- On the live site during the repair
- 0 incidents
Usually, yes. Updates can switch on new behavior or clash with old settings, and the damage sometimes builds slowly. We find the actual cause first, then fix it on a staging copy before we touch your live site.
Sometimes that is the answer, but it is worth checking first. On our last rescue, the backup from before the update had the right member settings, but renewal dates that matched none of the client's records and faults that predated the update. A blind restore would have swapped new damage for old.
Not always. Some problems can be diagnosed from the outside, and on our last rescue we found the root cause from the site's public data before we had access. The repair itself needs admin and hosting access, and we always work on a copy first.
Not if we can help it. We take and check our own backups before every change, rehearse each fix on a staging copy, and replay it on your live site only once it has held. On our last rescue, all 286 directory listings came through.
With an assessment. We map how the site is built, which plugins and services it depends on, and whose name each account is in, then move anything critical into yours so you are never locked out again.
Yes. Contact forms, password resets and reminders often fail because the mail connection belongs to someone who has moved on. We move sending to a service in your name and authenticate your domain so messages reach inboxes.
It depends on what is wrong, which is why we diagnose first and quote after. As a guide, our most recent directory repair took about 16 hours of work in total.
We will tell you honestly. If the site is sound underneath, a repair costs less. If it has become hard to keep patched, a rebuild on a modern stack can be cheaper to run and easier for your team to update. We have moved community organizations off WordPress for exactly that reason.
You get a plain-language care guide and a runbook, so whoever looks after the site next starts from a diagnosis, not a list of symptoms. If keeping WordPress running has become a burden, we can also help you move to a modern site that is easier and cheaper to look after.
Common
Questions
Get
In Touch