A shop is not a brochure site with a basket bolted on. When something breaks it costs money that afternoon, and the thing that breaks is almost always checkout.
On a brochure site a broken layout is embarrassing. On a shop, a payment gateway that stops authorising is lost revenue for every hour nobody notices. That difference should change how the site is looked after, and usually does not.
Shops also break in a particular place. A WooCommerce store carries extensions for payment, shipping, tax, subscriptions and whatever is specific to your trade, and each one updates on its own schedule. The failure is rarely the update itself — it is two extensions that both worked until one moved.
Which is why updating a shop straight onto the live site is a bad idea however careful you are. Testing on a copy first is the single practice that separates shops that have bad days from shops that have bad weeks.
What we do
Working UK-wide and internationally — directly with businesses, and white label behind design and marketing agencies.
Discuss a projectA test transaction run regularly rather than assuming. The failure nobody notices is the expensive one, and checkout can break silently while the rest of the site looks perfect.
Core, theme and extension updates applied to a staging copy, tested through a real purchase, then promoted. Not applied live and hoped for.
Providers change APIs and deprecate versions on their own timetable. That is a scheduled job, not an emergency, if somebody is watching for it.
Orders reaching your systems and stock staying accurate. A shop selling what it does not have costs you a refund and a customer.
Basket and checkout cannot be cached the way catalogue pages can, so they need attention separately — particularly before a busy period.
Backups and a tested restore, because the worst moment to discover a backup does not work is mid-sale.
Unless it is a fix for something already broken. A change that goes wrong on Friday afternoon costs you the weekend, and nothing routine is worth that.
Not WooCommerce itself. A shop with twenty extensions has twenty independent update schedules, and reducing that number is often the best thing we can do.
Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. If your trade peaks at the weekend, that is worth discussing before you sign rather than discovering on a Saturday.
A lot of our work is delivered white label or under agreement, so these describe the problem and the approach rather than naming the client.
Bespoke ecommerce for a luxury coffee supplier — one-off purchases and recurring bulk orders, with accounts, history and simplified repeat ordering.
Ecommerce · Product configuratorA bespoke configuration module built on top of a standard ecommerce platform, so customers can order hand-made furniture built to their own measurements.
Portal · Ecommerce · MigrationAn industrial-scale ordering portal migrated off a legacy platform, with client authentication, advanced search and form-to-CRM integration.
Preventive WordPress security: filtering before the CMS loads, site isolation, patching and scanning — and an honest account of what it cannot promise.
Managed website backups held off-site, with the job verified as having run and the restore actually tested. What most backup services never check.
Monitoring that checks real pages rather than just the home page, and alerts the people who can fix it rather than only telling you.
The platform, the extensions you depend on, and what has gone wrong before. That tells us where the risk actually sits, which is rarely where people expect.