Project Rescue.
Your Project Is in Trouble. We've Been Here Before.
Something went wrong. Maybe the agency that built your Craft site disappeared halfway through. Maybe the site launched, but it's painfully slow, riddled with bugs, or architecturally unsound. Maybe technical debt has accumulated to the point where every new feature takes three times longer than it should and breaks two things in the process.
Whatever happened, you need someone who can assess the damage, stabilize the situation, and chart a path forward. That's what we do.
We Don't Judge. We Fix.
We're not going to spend the first meeting telling you everything the last team did wrong. You already know it's bad—that's why you're here. We focus on understanding the current state of your project, determining what's salvageable, and building a realistic plan to get you where you need to be.
Every rescue engagement starts with an honest assessment. Sometimes the news is good: the foundation is solid and the problems are fixable without starting over. Sometimes the news is hard: the architecture is fundamentally flawed and targeted repairs would cost more than a well-planned rebuild. Either way, you'll get a clear picture and a recommendation you can trust.
We've rescued Craft projects from every kind of trouble, and we've learned that the specifics vary but the problems fall into familiar patterns.
What We Rescue
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Failed & Stalled Projects
The most common rescue scenario: a project that's over budget, past deadline, and nowhere near launch. The previous team may have left, been let go, or simply run out of capability. You're sitting on a partially built Craft site and you need someone to assess what exists, figure out what's usable, and get the thing across the finish line.
We start by auditing the existing codebase—not to assign blame, but to understand what we're working with. What's built correctly and can stay? What's close but needs rework? What needs to be thrown out? This triage typically takes a few days and gives us enough information to provide a realistic timeline and cost to complete the project.
We've taken over projects at every stage of failure, from "mostly done but the previous developer ghosted" to "six months of work by a team that didn't understand Craft and almost none of it is usable." The path forward looks different in each case, but there always is one.
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Performance Emergencies
Your site is live, it's slow, and it's costing you money right now. Maybe it's been slow since launch and you've finally decided to do something about it. Maybe it was fine until traffic grew and now pages take 6 seconds to load during business hours. Maybe a recent update broke something and response times tripled overnight.
Performance rescue is the most time-sensitive work we do. We triage immediately—identify the one or two highest-impact bottlenecks and fix them first to stop the bleeding. Then we systematically work through the remaining issues in order of business impact.
This is different from our performance optimization work, which is methodical and planned. Performance rescue is emergency medicine. Stabilize first, then optimize.
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Technical Debt
Your Craft site works. It launched. People use it. But under the hood, it's a mess. Every new feature takes twice as long as it should because the codebase is tangled, poorly documented, and fragile. Deployments are nerve-wracking because there's no test coverage and no one's entirely sure what will break. The content model has grown organically into something that confuses your editorial team and makes querying slow.
Technical debt doesn't crash your site—it slowly suffocates it. Development velocity drops. Quality drops. Team morale drops. And eventually the cost of working around the debt exceeds the cost of paying it down.
We help you systematically reduce technical debt without halting feature development. We assess the full codebase, identify the highest-cost debt (the things that slow down every sprint, not just the things that look ugly), and build a phased remediation plan that you can execute alongside normal development work.
How Rescue Engagements Work
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01Triage
We assess the situation quickly—usually within the first week. We review the codebase, the infrastructure, the content model, and the deployment pipeline. We talk to your team about what's working, what isn't, and what's been tried before. At the end of triage, you get a clear written assessment of the current state and our recommended path forward.
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02Stabilize
If there are active emergencies—the site is down, critically slow, or losing data—we address those immediately. Stabilization is about stopping ongoing damage, not fixing root causes. We apply targeted fixes to get you back to a functional baseline while we plan the more thorough work.
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03Plan
Based on triage, we build a phased rescue plan with realistic timelines and costs. We separate "must fix" from "should fix" from "nice to fix" and give you honest guidance on where to invest. Some clients want us to bring the project to full health. Others need us to get it to "good enough" so their team can take over. We scope for either.
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04Execute
We work through the plan systematically, delivering in short sprints with frequent check-ins. You'll see progress every week, and we'll flag risks or scope changes as soon as we identify them. Rescue work often uncovers surprises—things that look fine on the surface but are broken underneath, or vice versa—and we deal with those transparently.
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05Hand Off
When the rescue is complete, we transfer everything to your team or your ongoing development partner. That includes comprehensive documentation of what we changed and why, known issues we didn't address (and why we deprioritized them), and recommendations for ongoing maintenance. If you want us to continue as your development team, we're happy to transition into an ongoing support relationship.
Project Rescue FAQ
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01
How quickly can you start?
For active emergencies—site down, critical performance issues, security incidents—we can typically begin triage within 24-48 hours. For stalled projects and technical debt, we usually start within 1-2 weeks. Tell us your situation and we'll let you know what's realistic.
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02
How much does a rescue engagement cost?
It depends entirely on the scope of the problem. A performance emergency where we identify and fix two or three critical bottlenecks might take a week. Taking over a stalled enterprise project and bringing it to launch might take months. We'll give you a clear estimate after triage, and triage itself is a fixed-fee engagement so you know the cost of finding out.
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03
What if you assess our project and decide it needs to be rebuilt from scratch?
We'll tell you. We won't sugarcoat it and we won't recommend a rebuild unless we genuinely believe it's the most cost-effective path forward. In our experience, full rebuilds are necessary less often than people fear—most projects have salvageable foundations even when the surface looks bad. But when a rebuild is the right call, we'll explain exactly why and scope it as a new Craft development project.
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04
Can you rescue a Craft site that was built by another agency?
Yes—this is the majority of our rescue work. We regularly inherit Craft projects from agencies that overcommitted and underdelivered, freelancers who moved on, or internal teams that didn't have deep enough Craft expertise. We don't need the previous team's involvement to assess and fix the codebase, though any documentation or context they can provide helps.
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05
What if we don't want to stay on Craft?
That's a valid question, and we'll give you an honest answer. Sometimes the problem isn't Craft—it's the implementation. In those cases, we'll fix the implementation. But if your requirements have genuinely outgrown what Craft can handle (rare, but it happens), we'll tell you that too rather than forcing a platform that isn't the right fit. We're Craft specialists, but we're not dogmatic about it.
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06
Do you handle security incidents?
We can assess and remediate security vulnerabilities in Craft implementations—outdated dependencies, misconfigured permissions, exposed admin panels, and similar issues. For active breach response (forensics, incident reporting, compliance notification), you'll want a dedicated security firm, but we can stabilize the Craft application layer while they handle the broader response.