Website Clean Up

A website clean up is a fixed-scope project that strips out what has built up on your site over the years and repairs what has broken along the way. Unused plugins, a bloated database, oversized images, broken links, dead pages and unpatched security holes.

Your design and your content stay as they are. What sits behind them gets sorted out.

Three fixed tiers. Tidy Up is $750 + GST, Clean Up is $1,500 + GST and Overhaul is $3,000 + GST.

The difference is depth, not quality. Tidy Up covers updates, unused plugins and image compression. Clean Up adds the database, security hardening, dead content and redirects. Overhaul adds a tidy-up of ad hoc code fixes, a free migration to our hosting, and a full Website Health Check run before and after so you can see the difference in writing.

Code cleanup means the quick patches and non-standard workarounds that build up in a theme over the years. Custom integrations and anything built to spec are left alone unless you ask us to quote for them.

Two to four weeks from the go-ahead.

A Tidy Up is usually done inside a week. Clean Up runs around two weeks. An Overhaul takes three to four because of the audit at each end and the testing time a code cleanup needs. Larger sites and stores can run longer, and we will tell you that before you commit rather than halfway through.

No. We never work on your live site.

We take a copy to a staging server, do the work there, and test it properly. Only once everything passes do we push the changes live, which takes a couple of minutes. If something did go wrong we roll straight back to the copy we took on day one.

Hosting is separate, and it is worth being clear about why.

We clean up sites wherever they live, so you can stay on your current host. Some speed problems are the host’s fault though, and no amount of cleaning fixes an oversold shared server. If that is what we find, the Overhaul tier includes a free migration to our managed WordPress hosting, which starts at $100 + GST a month.

Much cheaper, when the site is worth keeping.

A clean up runs $750 to $3,000 + GST. A small business website starts at $8,000 + GST. If you still like how your site looks and it does what your business needs, cleaning it is the obvious call. If the design is dated, the structure is wrong, or it was never right in the first place, cleaning it just makes a bad site faster.

We tell you, and your fee comes off the rebuild.

Occasionally a site is held together by code so tangled that repairing it costs more than replacing it. If we reach that conclusion we say so plainly, and the full amount you paid for the clean up is credited against a new build with us. You do not pay twice to find out.

For the full clean up, yes.

The tiers above assume WordPress, because that is where the plugin, database and core-update work lives. If you are on Squarespace, Wix or a custom platform, a Website Health Check still applies and will tell you what is wrong. What we can then fix depends on what the platform lets anyone touch.

It removes things that hold you back rather than pushing you up.

Faster pages, working links, no duplicate content and a sitemap that reflects reality all matter to search engines. What a clean up does not do is create new content or build authority, so if you are not ranking because nobody has written the pages people search for, this is not the fix. We will say so if that is what we find.

It should look identical and feel faster.

A clean up is not a redesign. We change what is under the site, not what is on it. The one exception is when a plugin we remove was rendering something visible, and in that case we rebuild it properly in the theme first and show you before anything goes live.

Anything that changes what your site is, rather than what condition it is in.

A clean up is not a redesign. New content, new design and new functionality sit outside it. Third-party integrations are tested but not re-engineered, so if a vendor has changed their API or dropped support, sorting that out is a separate job. Where removing a plugin would take something visible off the page, we rebuild that piece in the theme first and show you before anything goes live.

Nothing is deleted without your sign-off. We flag what looks dead or duplicated and you decide. We do need admin access, plus hosting and DNS where the work calls for it, and time spent waiting on access extends the timeline.

We tell you before we upgrade anything, and you decide.

Part of the clean up is checking every plugin against the PHP version we are moving you to. Where one has been abandoned by its developer and will not run on a supported version, the options are usually a paid upgrade, a replacement plugin, or leaving that piece alone. Finding and fitting a replacement is quoted as extra work rather than absorbed into the fixed price, because the effort depends entirely on what the plugin was doing.

Licence renewals and paid upgrades for premium plugins and themes are at your cost. We will tell you what they come to before anything is bought.