WordPress fixes, speed and maintenance

Honest bands: routine fixes (plugin conflicts, errors, layout breaks) $50–300; diagnosis is the first billable hour and most fixes land 1–4 hours after the cause is found; hack cleanups $200–1,000 including hardening. The WordPress-specific catch: fixes on unmaintained sites often reveal the real problem is the unmaintained-ness — see the maintenance checklist.

Yes — standard repairs. The white screen and fatal errors are usually PHP failures: a plugin conflict, a theme error, or a memory limit hit after an update. The professional sequence: enable error logging, isolate the trigger (often via safe-mode plugins), fix, then stage the update path so it does not recur. Most land inside a $50–300 fix band.

Yes — the most common WordPress repair there is. Method: reproduce on staging, bisect the plugins to find the pair that collide, then fix (patch, replace one of them, or isolate the feature in clean code). The recurring-conflict pattern — the same fight every update — is a signal to replace the fragile plugin with a small custom one.

All three are standard fixes: checkout failures (usually payment-gateway or session conflicts — see WooCommerce work), login loops (cookies, redirects, security-plugin lockouts), 404s (permalink flushes, .htaccess, migration residue). Diagnosis-first billing applies; each is typically a 1–3 hour repair.

Fastest honest paths: a WordPress specialist with an emergency path (this desk runs one), Codeable for scoped fixes, or your maintenance provider if you have one — many fix-allowances are already in your plan. What to send the developer to halve the timeline: the exact error text, when it started, what changed last, and admin access.

The usual suspects in order: unoptimised images, a page-builder stacking too much CSS/JS, cheap shared hosting, too many plugins loading everywhere, and no caching. A developer fixes all five — real-world outcomes on neglected sites are load-time cuts of half or more. The service shape: performance engineering.

Focused optimization engagement: $300–1,500 for most sites (audit, image pipeline, caching, asset diet, hosting tune), $1,500–3,000+ when a page-builder build needs surgical work or a store has catalog-scale pages. Ongoing speed watch folds into maintenance. The launch-level speed checklist is free: SEO checklist.

Yes — measurably, and Core Web Vitals on WordPress is a solved discipline: LCP (image pipeline, caching, critical CSS), INP (JavaScript diet — usually the page builder's payload), CLS (font loading, image dimensions, ad/embed handling). Expect green on mobile for a properly tuned business site; treat "we'll get to 100 on PageSpeed" promises with caution — field data beats lab scores. Details: Core Web Vitals service.

Yes, both — with honest caveats. Elementor: optimisation works within the builder (asset loading rules, custom widgets replacing heavy ones, hosting tuned for its DOM weight) but the ceiling is real; see the Elementor page. WooCommerce: catalog queries, caching exclusions for cart/checkout, image pipeline at product scale — see Woo optimization. Neither needs a rebuild as the first move; optimise first, rebuild only if the ceiling binds.

Honest bands: $200–1,000 for cleanups (isolate, clean, patch the entry point, harden), more when the hack has SEO-poisoned pages or spam payloads deep in the database. Prevention is dramatically cheaper — the whole hardening list is free in the security checklist, and most maintenance plans include the monitoring that catches intrusions early.

Yes — the professional sequence: isolate (take offline or block attackers), scan and clean (core files replaced from source, database scrubbed), patch the entry point (usually an outdated plugin or nulled theme), harden, then monitor. What separates a cleanup from a professional cleanup: finding the entry point — removing malware without closing the door means paying twice.

The core is well-audited and updated by a large security team — the vulnerabilities are almost always outdated plugins, nulled themes, weak admin credentials and abandoned installs. WordPress is as secure as its maintenance discipline: updated, hardened, backed up, monitored. That discipline is exactly what care plans exist for.

The boring list that works: updates applied within days, no nulled plugins/themes ever, strong admin credentials + 2FA, limited login exposure, a firewall/monitoring layer, verified backups with tested restores, and an admin-user policy (no shared "admin" account). Each item maps to a line in the security checklist — print it, work it.

Same-host or host-to-host WordPress move: $150–600 for straightforward sites; to a new domain with SEO continuity: $300–1,000; builder-to-WordPress migrations (Wix, Squarespace) $1,000–5,000 including content redesign; platform moves (Joomla/Drupal) similar. The variable is never the distance — it is data quality and redirect count. Full taxonomy: the migration section.

Host-to-host: no, done properly — same URLs, same content, a staging rehearsal, minimal DNS cutover window. Domain or platform changes: rankings move only as much as your redirect discipline allows — every old URL mapped, submitted, monitored. The safety procedure is its own discipline: SEO migration.

Yes — content, images and structure move; design gets rebuilt on WordPress properly (which is usually the point of migrating). What honestly does not auto-migrate: builder-specific widgets, some embeds, and any platform-hosted features. Expect the migration to be part-rebuild: $1,000–5,000 for most sites. When it is worth it: ownership, SEO control, and feature ceilings — the reasoning: platform decisions.

Host-to-host: 1–3 days including rehearsal and cutover. New domain with full redirect map: 1–2 weeks with monitoring. Builder-to-WordPress: 3–6 weeks (it is a rebuild with content transport). The pattern across all: rehearsal first, cutover in a low-traffic window, verification after — the checklist version: migration section.

Usually 60–100% of a comparable new build: theme-refresh redesigns $1,500–5,000, full redesigns with content strategy $5,000–20,000+ from independents. The WordPress-specific fork: redesign on the existing stack versus rebuild (new theme, clean editor setup) — the honest test is whether the current site's plugin load and builder weight are the problem a reskin cannot fix. See redesign work.

Redesign when the bones are healthy — content structure sound, plugins sane, only the look and conversion flow lag. Rebuild when the site is slow under its own plugin weight, the builder stack fights every change, or the editor experience terrifies the team. The middle path many take: rebuild the theme around a clean block system, keep the content and URL structure. The decision checklist: redesign checklist.

Yes — it is the entire discipline of a proper WordPress redesign: crawl the old URL set, map every URL, preserve titles/H1s/schema on ranking pages, stage the redesign, deploy redirects before announce, monitor Search Console for two weeks. Done carelessly, redesigns destroy rankings overnight; done properly, they hold and improve. The procedure: the redesign checklist.

Visual refresh every 3–5 years; continuous improvement quarterly against analytics — the better pattern. WordPress-specific: a platform-migration decision (new theme architecture, block editor, or headless) rides on technical triggers, not the calendar. Sites improved continuously rarely need dramatic redesigns.

Independent care plans: $30–150/month (updates, backups, monitoring, small edits); commerce or membership sites $100–400/month; agency tiers above that add content work. The WordPress-specific must-haves: staged updates (not bulk-apply), tested restores, and a security-response path. What a fair plan includes: care plans here, the clauses to demand: maintenance agreement template.

Design-included custom theme: $3,000–15,000 from senior independents (design system, templates, block/editor integration, performance budget). Design-to-Figma conversion (you bring the design): $1,500–8,000. The honest caveat: "custom theme" that is actually a modified stock theme is a different product at a different price — ask which you are buying. The work: theme development.

Small custom plugin (one integration or feature): $800–3,000. Mid-size (booking flows, admin tools, payment logic): $3,000–10,000. Complex (multi-role portals, migrations of legacy logic): $10,000–30,000+. The first question a good developer asks: does this need a custom plugin at all, or does an existing one plus configuration fit? The discipline: plugin development.

Yes — integrations are a large share of serious WordPress work: payment gateways (payment integration), CRMs (HubSpot, Salesforce — forms and lead sync), WhatsApp (click-to-chat through to API-driven notification flows), booking systems (Calendly-class embeds through native booking builds), email marketing, ERPs and accounting. Pricing runs on integration depth: $500 embeds, $2,000–10,000 API-driven workflows.

Theme build: 2–6 weeks. Custom plugin: 1–4 weeks small, 4–10 weeks mid-size. Full custom site with store: 6–14 weeks. The WordPress constant: content readiness moves every timeline more than code does. The planning reality: timelines & scope FAQ.

The three honest differentiators: staged updates (update on a copy first — bulk-applying to production is how maintenance providers cause outages), restore testing (a backup nobody has restored is a hope), and a written security-response path (who does what, how fast, when something pops). Demand all three in writing — the template shows how: maintenance agreement.