Repair rather than rebuild

A slow site is not a finished site, and confusing the two is expensive. It is expensive because it always leans the same way: towards whoever bills the most.

The diagnosis comes before the proposal

We start with a written diagnosis, before any commercial proposal. It says what is broken, what is merely slow, what is dangerous, and how much work each point represents. It belongs to the client, and nothing obliges them to give us the work that follows.

That order is not a courtesy. A supplier who quotes before diagnosing quotes for what they know how to do, and then discovers the problem was elsewhere. A diagnosis that commits you to nothing can conclude there is almost nothing to do, which a commercial proposal never concludes.

It covers load time measured on desktop and on a phone, pages returning errors, dead links, forms that no longer send, the version of the platform and its plugins with the known vulnerabilities in them, whether backups exist and above all whether they genuinely restore.

The first thing we look at takes five minutes

The most common case is not a technical fault, it is the unreachable supplier. The site runs, nobody can touch it, and the company has neither the credentials nor the code.

That case is also the simplest to handle, on one condition: that the domain name is in the company’s name. If it is, control of the hosting and the credentials is recovered without the cooperation of whoever left. If it is not, the whole rest of the conversation changes, and the handover becomes a negotiation rather than a technical operation.

That check takes five minutes and it is the first thing we look at, before measuring anything at all. For a .be domain the declared holder is public, in the DNS Belgium register, so anyone can run the check themselves before calling us.

When a rebuild is the right answer

It is right when repairing would cost more than rebuilding, and that case exists. A platform abandoned by its publisher, an accumulation of plugins that contradict one another, a theme edited directly in its files so that no update passes without breaking the display.

In those situations, every fix triggers two more, and the repair quote exceeds that of a new site. We propose it then, and we show the arithmetic rather than assert it.

What a rebuild loses, and nobody counts

A four-year-old site has accumulated something that appears on no invoice: addresses the search engines know, pages that rank, inbound links pointing at precise URLs.

A rebuild that changes the address structure without a redirection plan loses all of it within weeks, and traffic takes months to return when it returns at all. That is why we raise this before aesthetics, and not after go-live.