Services · 05 · The way in
You inherited it. Now what.
A paid, fixed-fee read of a codebase somebody else wrote, ending in a written verdict you keep - rescue it, rebuild it, or leave it alone. Sometimes the answer is leave it alone.
A fixed-fee review of a site or platform you inherited, by the people who would have to maintain it. You get a written verdict: what shape the code is actually in, whether it can be kept, and what each road costs. The verdict is yours to keep and yours to forward, including to whoever currently looks after it.
Pick this when
- Your developer or agency stopped answering, and nobody knows what is inside the site any more.
- Updates make you nervous, so nobody runs them, so the problem compounds quietly.
- You have been quoted a rebuild and want a second opinion from someone not selling you that rebuild.
- You are about to buy a business and need to know whether its platform is an asset or a bill.
Most takeovers arrive as an emergency. The person who built it has gone, something is broken, and the only honest answer anyone can give you is that nobody knows what is in there.
That is a bad moment to make an expensive decision, which is exactly when most people make one.
Why it costs money
A free audit is not an audit. It is a sales document, and everyone involved knows it, which is why the verdict is always the same and always expensive.
Charging for it changes what it is. You are buying a written opinion from engineers who have no stake in which answer they give you, and you keep the document whatever you decide. Forward it to your current developer if you have one. The findings are yours either way.
The three answers
Rescue. The foundations are sound and the mess is on the surface. You get a scoped fix list, in priority order, with what each item costs and what happens if you skip it. Most inherited sites land here, and it is usually far cheaper than the rebuild somebody quoted.
Rebuild. The code cannot be maintained at a sane price, and every month spent patching it is money set on fire. You get that said plainly, with a scope and a number, and the reasoning that got us there so you can challenge it.
Leave it alone. Your site is fine. Here are three things worth fixing, none of them urgent, and no, we do not want the work. This verdict is real, it happens, and the day we stop issuing it the other two stop being worth anything.
What you actually get
For a WordPress site, one day of work: the theme code read properly, the plugin list assessed one entry at a time, the hosting and update situation established, and a verdict. For a Laravel application or a larger platform, a week: the architecture, the data model, the test coverage if any, the deployment path, the dependencies you cannot upgrade and why.
Both end the same way. A written document, in plain language, that a non-technical owner can read and a technical one can argue with.
What happens after
If the verdict is rescue or rebuild, the scope in the document is the scope we would quote from. Nothing gets discovered later that was visible during the audit.
It is also the only way into a maintenance arrangement on a site we did not build. We do not take on code nobody has read and promise to keep it alive. That promise would be worthless, and you would only find out in the year we could not keep it.
- WordPress
- €400
- One day. Theme code, plugin list, verdict.
- Laravel or platform
- €1,200
- One week. Full code review plus a scoped takeover path.
- Output
- A written verdict
- Yours to keep, yours to forward.
- Possible answers
- Three
- Rescue, rebuild, or leave it alone.
Xcruiter
A live recruitment platform with real customers, handed over when its original developer moved on. We read it before touching it, kept the foundations that were sound, rebuilt the ones that were costing money every month, and have shipped on the same codebase ever since. That is what a takeover looks like when it goes right.
Read the caseWhat we won't do
- Shade a verdict toward the more expensive road because the more expensive road is ours.
- Hand you an automated scanner report and call it a code review.
- Sell you a rewrite dressed up as maintenance.
- Agree to maintain a codebase nobody has read.
Common questions
Can you take over and fix an existing WordPress site?
Yes. A large part of our work is inheriting sites, often after an agency handoff, auditing the plugin pile, and taking it back down to a short list we can maintain for years.
Can you migrate my existing site to better hosting?
Yes, and it is often the cheapest reliability upgrade a site can get. We move it onto a proper server with staging and version control, usually as part of taking the site over for maintenance.
How do you find out when something on my site breaks?
Monitoring that watches the business, not just the server. Most tools tell you a site is down, which is the easy case and the rare one. The expensive failures are quiet: a contact form that stops handing mail to the server after an update, a checkout that fails at payment, an expired certificate, a page still returning 200 with nothing on it. We built GoFirmo for exactly that, because we maintain sites for other people and needed it, and it runs across the ones we look after. The point is that we hear about it before you do.
Do you use a page builder like Elementor or Divi?
No. On every site we have shipped, we build a custom theme and structure content with ACF Flexible Content, so editors compose pages from modules we designed. No Elementor, Divi or WPBakery.
Bring us the plan. We'll price it.
If this isn't the right pattern for you, we'll say so in the first reply.