Description
“It still works, so why touch it?”
Because an ageing WordPress site isn’t stable. It’s stalled – and the gap between it and everything around it keeps widening.
WordPress has moved on. Only the newest release in the current series is actively maintained; everything behind it is running on borrowed time. PHP has moved further. Since WordPress 7.0, PHP 7.2 and 7.3 aren’t supported at all, and WordPress recommends a current PHP 8 release running on MySQL 8.0+ or MariaDB 10.11+, with HTTPS on every install. Meanwhile PHP 8.1 and everything older than it is end of life – no security fixes, not now, not ever again – and 8.2 is already down to security-only patches.
Your hosting company knows all this, which is why the decision usually gets made for you. Hosts retire end-of-life PHP on their own schedule, and the first many owners hear about it is a white screen where their website used to be – at which point it’s an emergency, at your cost, on someone else’s timetable.
The plugins carry the real risk, though. WordPress patches its own security releases automatically in the background, but that only covers core, and only within the branch you’re already on. It will not move you to a new major version, and it does nothing whatsoever about the plugin you installed years ago that the developer abandoned shortly afterwards. Every one of those is a published, indexed, permanently available list of ways into your site – and attackers scan for exactly that, at scale, indiscriminately. Nobody is targeting you personally. They don’t need to.
There’s a compliance edge as well. If your site collects enquiries, accounts or orders, you’re processing personal data, and UK GDPR expects appropriate technical measures to keep it secure. “We were four major versions behind on everything” is a difficult position to defend after the fact.
Why people put it off – and why they’re right to be nervous
Most of our upgrade work comes from business owners who already knew they were behind. They didn’t act because they’d heard the horror story: someone clicks “Update All” on a Friday afternoon, the page builder and the theme fall out with each other, half the layouts collapse, and the site that was merely out of date is now visibly broken in front of customers.
That fear is well founded. Updating a neglected WordPress site in place, live, with no way back, genuinely does break sites. The answer isn’t to avoid the update forever. It’s to stop doing it that way.
How we do it
Nothing changes on your live site until the upgraded version has been built and tested somewhere else first.
1. Pre-upgrade audit.
We record exactly what you’re running: WordPress version, PHP and database versions, every plugin and theme with its update status, and your server configuration. We flag the things that will cause trouble – plugins no longer maintained or pulled from the directory, expired premium licences, page builders with known upgrade quirks, custom theme code written against older PHP, and any modifications made directly to core or plugin files by whoever came before us. You get this as a written compatibility report.
2. Full backup and a staging copy.
We take a complete backup of files and database, verify it restores, and build a private clone of your site to work on. Your live site keeps running and taking business throughout.
3. The upgrade path, in the right order.
Very old installs can’t jump straight to current – the database schema has to come forward in stages, and skipping steps is how sites get corrupted. We step the core through its versions properly, then bring PHP up to a currently supported release, then update plugins and themes one at a time, checking the site after each. When something breaks, we know precisely what broke it. Batch updates hide that, which is why the “Update All” button causes so much damage.
4. Fixing what the upgrade exposes.
Deprecated PHP that now throws errors, jQuery calls that no longer resolve, custom functions in your theme written for a version of WordPress that no longer exists – we fix it in a child theme so the work survives future updates. Where a plugin is genuinely abandoned, we find and migrate you to a maintained equivalent rather than leaving it in place and hoping.
5. Testing against your actual business, not a checklist.
We test what you’d notice if it stopped: contact and booking forms with real submissions, email delivery, logins, search, payment gateways and full test checkouts on WooCommerce sites, CRM and accounting integrations, tracking and analytics, and every template on desktop and mobile. On the SEO side we confirm URLs, redirects, sitemaps, canonicals and structured data all survive intact – an upgrade that silently changes your permalinks costs far more than it saved.
6. Go-live in a planned window.
We agree a low-traffic slot with you, put the site into maintenance mode, deploy the tested version, and re-check the critical paths immediately afterwards. Downtime is measured in minutes, not hours – and if something unexpected surfaces, the verified backup goes straight back on. You are never left stuck with a broken site.
7. Hardening and handover. (optional)
While we’re in there we correct insecure file permissions, disable in-browser file editing, remove the dormant plugins and unused themes that nobody needed but everybody left installed, and clear out redundant admin accounts. You get a plain-English report: what was upgraded, what was fixed, what we removed and why, and what to keep an eye on. Sites usually come out of this noticeably faster too – current PHP is substantially quicker than the versions most neglected sites are stranded on.
What’s included
- WordPress core brought up to a current, maintained release
- PHP upgraded to a supported version, coordinated with your host
- All plugins and themes updated, with abandoned ones identified and replaced
- Database upgrade and optimisation
- Compatibility fixes to theme and custom code
- Full backup, staging build and rollback plan
- Complete functional, e-commerce and mobile testing
- SEO integrity checks
- Basic security hardening (optional)
- Written before-and-after report
What this isn’t
This is a technical upgrade, not a redesign. Your site comes back looking and behaving the way it does now – just current, secure and faster. If what you actually want is a new design or a rebuild on modern block-based foundations, that’s a different conversation and we’re happy to have it. We’ll also tell you honestly when an upgrade isn’t the right spend: some sites are so old, so heavily hacked-about or so dependent on dead plugins that rebuilding costs less than repairing. You’ll hear that from us before you pay, not after.
Our guarantee
- One fixed price, paid upfront. No hourly billing, no surprise additions, no “we found something” invoice at the end. You know the cost before we start and it doesn’t move.
- Rollback promise. If the upgrade can’t be completed cleanly, we restore your site exactly as it was and refund you in full.
- 30 days of aftercare. If something related to the upgrade surfaces in the first 30 days, we fix it at no charge.
- A named developer, not a ticket queue. You’ll know who is doing the work and you can talk to them.
Scope
Covers one WordPress site, unlimited pages, including WooCommerce stores. Multisite networks, headless installs and sites with heavy custom development are quoted separately – send us the URL and we’ll tell you. If you have several sites sharing a hosting account, set the quantity accordingly; they usually share the same PHP version, so it’s far cheaper to do them together than one at a time.
Add to basket and we’ll book your upgrade window – or send us your URL first and we’ll tell you what you’re actually running.
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