Fix Existing Website in New Zealand

Write down the symptom, not the diagnosis

The cheapest thing you can do before asking anyone for a price is describe what you actually see. "The website is broken" gets you five quotes with five different assumptions behind them. "The contact form says thanks but no email arrives, since about the middle of last month, and it still works if I use my phone" gets you five quotes for the same job.

Useful things to include:

• What you were doing when it happened, and what you expected instead.
• When it started, even roughly, and what changed around then.
• Whether it happens on every device or only some.
• A screenshot of any error message, including the exact wording.
• What the site is built on, if you know — WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, or something custom.

If you do not know what it is built on, say that too. It is a normal thing not to know, and a developer can usually tell in thirty seconds.

Find out who holds the keys before you hire anyone

The most expensive fixes are not technically difficult. They are expensive because nobody can get in.

There are three separate things people assume are the same thing, and they are often held by three different people:

1. The domain name — registered with a registrar, and renewable only by whoever controls that account.
2. The DNS — what points your domain at your website and your email. Frequently sitting with a developer who left in 2019.
3. The hosting — where the site's files and database actually live, and where the bill goes.

Go and look for all three now. Search your email for renewal invoices. If your domain ends in .nz you can check the registry directly and see the registrar's name. Turning up to quoting with the logins in hand routinely takes thousands off a rescue job, and it is the one part of this you can do yourself.

Fix, or start again?

This is the real question, and the honest answer is not always the one that suits the person answering it.

Rebuilding is usually right when:

• The platform or framework is no longer supported, so every fix is a workaround.
• Every small change costs more than it should, and has for a while.
• You have already spent more on repairs than half the cost of a new site.
• The site cannot be made secure — old plugins, an unsupported PHP version, no updates available.

Repairing is usually right when:

• The site does its job and you are not unhappy with it.
• The problem is specific and has a cause somebody has already named.
• You need it working this week and a rebuild is a three-month conversation.

Ask every developer quoting for their answer to this before the price. A developer who will only quote you a rebuild may be right, but you should hear them say why. A developer who tells you your site is fine and only needs $900 of work has just cost themselves a $30,000 project, which is worth noticing.

Diagnosis is real work, and someone has to pay for it

Nobody can price a fix for a problem they have not looked at. Two honest ways to handle that:

• A paid investigation — a fixed fee, often $500 to $1,500, to find the cause and quote the fix properly. You keep the findings whether or not you use them for the work.
• A capped hourly arrangement — work proceeds hourly, with a ceiling you agree first and a phone call if it is going to be reached.

What should worry you is a firm fixed price for a problem nobody has diagnosed. Either it is padded to cover the worst case, or it will be revised once work starts. Both are worse than being told honestly that the cause is not yet known.

Insist on a backup before anything is touched

This is not paranoia. Sites that are already broken tend to be sites with no working backup, and the fastest way to turn a $900 problem into a $9,000 one is to have someone experiment on the live site.

Ask where the backup will be kept, whether it includes the database as well as the files, and whether they have tested restoring it. "We take a backup" and "we have restored this backup" are different sentences.

Then stop it happening again

Almost every emergency repair in this category was avoidable. Sites break because nobody updated them, nobody was watching, and nobody had a relationship with a developer any more.

Once the immediate problem is solved, ask what ongoing maintenance costs. For a small business site it is typically $80 to $300 a month, covering updates, backups, uptime monitoring and a small allowance of changes. That is materially cheaper than the rescue job you have just paid for, and the developer who has just been inside your site is the cheapest person to buy it from.

Comparing five quotes

Prices in this category spread wider than almost anywhere else, because the quotes are not for the same thing. Read for these:

• Who asked a question you had not thought of before quoting?
• Who told you what they would do if the cause is not what it looks like?
• Who mentioned a backup without being prompted?
• Who was willing to tell you the site is worth keeping — or worth replacing — against their own interest?

Describe the symptom, say what platform it is on if you know, and say whether you have the logins. Five developers will tell you what they think is wrong, and where they disagree is exactly where you should be asking more questions.