Legacy or unsupported
Rebuilding a custom or abandoned website
Somebody built this site for you years ago. They did good work at the time. Then they moved on, or changed careers, or stopped answering email — and since then nobody has touched it, because nobody knows how. If that is your situation, it is more common than you think and it is entirely fixable.
Where you actually stand
Bespoke sites from the 2010s are usually hand-written PHP, sometimes on an old framework, occasionally on something the developer invented. There is rarely documentation. There is often no version control. The credentials live in an email thread nobody can find.
The site keeps working, which is what makes it so easy to leave alone. Right up until the host upgrades PHP and half the pages start throwing errors, or somebody notices the contact form has been silently failing for eight months, or a scan finds the site is running a library with a decade-old vulnerability.
The reason this drifts is not negligence. It is that every quote to fix it comes back high, because any developer looking at undocumented legacy code has to understand it before they can safely touch a line. Rebuilding is frequently cheaper than repairing, and it ends the problem instead of deferring it.
You probably own it. You just cannot use it.
If you paid for a custom build, the code is most likely yours — though whether that was ever put in writing is another question, and often it was not.
Ownership without access is not worth much. If you cannot get into the server, cannot find the source, and cannot find anyone who understands it, you own something you cannot change. A rebuild gives you both: the asset and the ability to use it, with the assignment documented properly this time.
What this costs you day to day
Nobody knows how it works
No documentation, no comments, no handover. Every change starts with someone spending billable hours working out what the last person did.
Unpatched dependencies
Old PHP, old libraries, old jQuery, and no update path. Vulnerabilities that were fixed years ago upstream are still sitting in your site.
A PHP upgrade will eventually break it
Hosts retire old PHP versions on their own schedule, not yours. When that day arrives, the site breaks without warning and nobody is on call.
You may not have the source at all
No repository, no backup, no local copy. Whatever is on the server is the only copy in existence — and it is one hosting incident from being gone.
Small changes cost real money
Changing a phone number becomes a quoted job because someone has to find where it is hard-coded across the site first.
How the rebuild works
Six steps, and your involvement is deliberately minimal. We handle the technical side, bring you recommendations, and come to you when a decision or an approval is genuinely needed. You review the finished site before it goes live.
- 1
We audit your current website
We review your existing site — pages, content, SEO, functionality and structure. We identify what should be improved, updated or dropped, rather than copying over things that were never working.
- 2
We rebuild the site in Next.js
Your branding and content carry over, but the site is rebuilt from the ground up in Next.js. That removes the database and plugin dependencies behind most performance, security and maintenance problems.
For your custom site specifically: We do not need the original source, the original developer, or any documentation. We work from the live site — crawl every page, capture the content, pull the images, map the URLs. If you can still reach the server we will take a copy of anything useful, but we are not dependent on it.
- 3
We improve it while we rebuild it
This is the part people underestimate. We are not handing you a newer version of the same website. We look for real gains in navigation, page layout, calls to action, mobile experience, content and SEO.
- 4
We preserve your SEO
Existing URLs, page titles, metadata and redirects are all accounted for in the transition. The goal is to move platforms without giving up the search visibility you have already built.
- 5
We test everything before it goes live
Desktop and mobile, every form, every piece of functionality, all content reviewed — checked and working before we touch anything in production.
- 6
We launch
Once you approve it, we move the new site into production. From your side the transition should be uneventful, and your visitors should never see an interruption.
What comes with you
- All page content, captured from the live site
- Images at full resolution, re-optimised
- Your branding, modernised but recognisable
- Every existing URL, preserved or 301 redirected
- Forms, rebuilt and actually delivering
- Your domain, in your name, with access you control
You own what we build. In writing.
Every rebuild is delivered with a Certificate of Ownership and IP Assignment: a signed document assigning you the copyright in the site code and the content we produce for you, and recording the transfer of the repository, the domain and the hosting account into your name. You are not licensing your website from us. If you ever leave, you take the whole thing with you — the code, the content, the domain, the repository and the deployment history.
- Full copyright assignment in the site code and the content we write for you.
- The Git repository transferred to an account you control, with its full history.
- The domain in your name, at a registrar of your choosing.
- Hosting in your own Vercel account if you want it there — we can manage it, but ownership sits with you.
- No proprietary page builder, no template licence, and nothing that stops working if you stop paying us.
Questions people ask about leaving your custom site
- I have no idea what my site is built on. Is that a problem?
- Not at all, and it is the normal starting point. Send us the address and we will tell you what the site is running, what state it is in, and roughly what a rebuild would cost.
- I cannot reach the original developer. Can you still do this?
- Yes. We work from the live site. We do not need their cooperation, their files, or their passwords. The only thing we will eventually need is access to your domain’s DNS, and if that is also lost we can help you recover it through the registrar.
- Is rebuilding cheaper than fixing what I have?
- Very often, yes. Repairing undocumented legacy code means paying someone to understand it first, and you end up with the same fragile system. A rebuild is a known quantity with a fixed price, and afterwards changes are cheap because the code is modern and documented.
- What if my site is genuinely broken already?
- Still workable. If pages are erroring we can usually recover content from archives and search-engine caches. Tell us what is broken and we will tell you honestly what is recoverable before you commit to anything.
Also worth reading
WordPress
You own it — but you also own the plugin update treadmill and the security surface that comes with it.
Read the WordPress pageJoomla
Joomla 3 reached end of life in August 2023. If you are still on it, you are running unsupported software.
Read the Joomla pageDrupal
Drupal 7 lost community security support on 5 January 2025. A great many small-business sites never left it.
Read the Drupal page
Start by finding out where you actually are
The free scan tells you what your site is built on, what is slowing it down, what search engines and AI answer engines can currently read, and roughly what a rebuild would cost.
No website yet? We build new sites from scratch