Something broke, the developer who built it is gone, and the “WordPress expert” you found wants a retainer before even looking. We do it the other way round: describe the problem, we diagnose, you get a quote — then we fix it.
Problems we fix routinely
- White screen of death, fatal errors, sites stuck in maintenance mode. Usually a PHP fatal from a plugin, a memory limit that was never raised, or a leftover
.maintenancefile after a failed update. - Hacked or malware-infected sites — cleanup, hardening, and getting the browser warning removed. We check for injected admin users, modified core files, backdoors in
wp-content/uploads, and rogue scheduled tasks, not just what a scanner plugin reports. - Plugin and theme conflicts after updates. Isolated by bisection on a staging copy — never by deactivating everything on your live site and hoping.
- Contact forms that stopped sending email. Sometimes the form failed silently before it ever tried to send; more often it is deliverability — missing SPF/DKIM, a server with no mail transfer agent at all, or an SMTP plugin failing since a password rotation. We work down the four layers instead of guessing which one it is.
- WooCommerce checkout and payment failures — gateway callbacks not arriving, orders stuck in pending, tax or shipping rules that stopped matching.
- Slow sites. Real performance work: query profiling, autoloaded options, unoptimised images, render-blocking assets. Not installing another caching plugin on top of the two you already have.
- Broken layouts after a PHP or WordPress version upgrade, including page builder content that no longer renders.
What we check first
Most “mystery” WordPress failures resolve in the first twenty minutes if you look in the right order. Ours:
- The actual error. Not the blank page — the log.
WP_DEBUG_LOG, the PHP error log, and the server error log. A white screen with no log entry is a different problem from a white screen with a fatal, and they get different fixes. - What changed immediately before. Plugin update, PHP version bump, SSL renewal, DNS change, host migration. The timestamp on the error log usually settles this in seconds.
- Whether it is site-wide or scoped. Front end only, admin only, one template, one URL pattern, or logged-in users only — each points somewhere different.
- Caching layers. Object cache, page cache, CDN, and the browser. We verify against an uncached response before concluding anything, because a “fixed” site that still serves stale HTML wastes everyone’s afternoon.
We report what we found, in plain language. If the cause is something you can avoid repeating, we tell you how.
How emergency work runs
- You describe the symptom and send temporary admin or hosting access.
- We take a full backup before touching anything. Files and database, off your server. Non-negotiable, every time.
- Diagnosis with a fixed quote — you approve before work starts. If we can’t fix it, you don’t pay for the attempt.
- Fix, verify, document — what broke, what we changed, and how to avoid a repeat. Verification means checking the actual behaviour that failed, not just that the homepage loads.
Access, safety and what we won’t do
We work on live sites when we have to, on a staging copy whenever we can. Two rules we don’t bend:
- Backup before the first change. Every engagement, including “it’s just a quick one”.
- Rollback path defined before we start. If a fix makes things worse, we can put your site back the way it was.
You can revoke our access the moment work is signed off — and you should. We’ll tell you which credentials to rotate.
Why a China-based team
Two practical reasons, beyond cost:
- Time zone. If you’re in Europe or North America, our working day covers your night. Sites that break after your team goes home get looked at while you sleep, not the next morning.
- China-market experience. If your site needs to load properly for visitors inside mainland China — ICP filing, hosting choices, replacing blocked Google Fonts and map or font CDNs that silently break rendering behind the Great Firewall — that’s a routine job here and an unfamiliar one for most Western agencies.
Ongoing care
If you’d rather never meet the white screen again: monthly maintenance covering WordPress core, plugin and theme updates applied on staging first, off-site backups with restore tests, uptime monitoring, security hardening and small fixes. Ask about it after your first fix — most clients do.
Common questions
How fast do you respond?
For a site that is down, same working day. Tell us in your first message that the site is offline — it changes how we queue it.
What does it cost?
One-off fixes are quoted flat after diagnosis, so you know the number before we start. Monthly maintenance is priced by site size and how much traffic and commerce it carries. We quote after looking; we don’t publish a price for work we haven’t seen.
Do you need full admin access?
An administrator account is enough for most fixes. Fatal errors, malware cleanup and performance work usually also need SFTP or hosting panel access, because the evidence lives in files and logs that WordPress itself can’t show you.
Can you take over a site another developer built?
Yes — that’s most of this work. We don’t require a rebuild before helping you, and we don’t need the original developer’s cooperation.
What if the site is already hacked?
Tell us before granting access so we contain it properly. Cleanup includes finding the entry point, not just deleting the payload — otherwise it comes back within days.
Describe your problem — include your site URL and what changed right before things broke, if you know it.
Further reading: WordPress White Screen of Death: Fix It Step by Step · WordPress Development & Web Design · Websites for the China Market