A shop in Birmingham added plugins until the admin menu no longer fitted on a laptop: subscriptions, a cookie wall, two SEO packs, a slider, and a Stripe connector. The cookie banner covered the pay button on a phone. Webhooks failed, so GoCardless mandates looked unpaid even when the bank had taken the money. VAT on the receipt disagreed with the basket. The page took 8.1 seconds on a handset in Leeds. Checkout completion in the planning model was 1.6%. The freelancer who built it had been paid £6,400 plus VAT, then stopped replying after a GDPR deletion request from a London customer exposed that form data lived in their personal hosting account. Manchester trade buyers still ordered by email. Edinburgh was on the footer and nowhere in the shipping rules. Bristol and Liverpool customers could not create an account. Glasgow was never in scope, which at least was honest.
A frankenstein admin
Fourteen plugins is not a platform. It is a set of vendors who do not test together. Updates become a fear. Replacing the base is the point where adding another plugin costs more than removing five.
Checkout the phone can finish
A banner that hides the pay button is a lost order, and a broken Stripe webhook is a finance problem. The rebuilt checkout in the model loaded in 2.2 seconds and completion moved to 3.1%. Test on a phone in Birmingham: VAT-inclusive total, Stripe payment, GoCardless only for true subscriptions, and a GDPR notice that does not block the button. The same person must be able to ask for deletion without emailing a stranger.
When the upgrade is a store or an app
Use ecommerce when the catalogue and VAT invoices are the work and purchases are occasional. Use an app when drivers, engineers, or members live in the workflow every day. Do not commission an app because the website is slow. Speed is a site job.
Stop the ghosting pattern
- Hosting, domain, Stripe, and GoCardless belong to the company before the next milestone.
- You can log into staging yourself.
- A backup exists before changes.
- A deletion request can be completed from your side.
CrazzyCodes scopes the handover before the new build. If the honest answer is "get the keys back and stop", that is the estimate. No lock-in afterwards.
Separate a store problem from an app problem
Bring the plugin list. We will say whether you need ecommerce, an app, or just the handover. Apps in the UK
Ecommerce in the UK