Vol. I  ·  No. 02 A QUARTERLY ON BUILDING THINGS THAT WORK 2026-04-27

PIXEL PULSE

THE WORK  ·  FEATURE

The Work

Three Engagements,
on the recurring work of fixing the broken web.

By Pixel Pulse  ·  Filed under: The Work  ·  Updated 2026-04-27

A small shop ends up with a small list. After ten years of phone calls, three jobs keep coming back: a store that needs to be built or rebuilt, a WordPress site that has been broken into, and a hosting bill nobody can quite explain.1 What follows is each of those engagements, written out at length, with prices stated plainly so there is nothing to negotiate later.

Engagement I

Online stores that actually sell.

Shopify or WooCommerce, depending on what the catalogue and the accountant prefer. Stripe at the checkout. Real product pages, real inventory, real receipts.

Most stores we are asked to fix were built in a weekend by someone who left town. The product pages render, the cart adds items, and then the checkout fails on a card the owner has been swiping at the register all year. We rebuild from the checkout outward. The payment flow is tested with real cards, in real currencies, against real tax rules, before the homepage is touched. Once money can move through the site without supervision, the rest is layout.

We pick the platform to fit the catalogue, not the other way around. A shop with forty SKUs and one warehouse runs on Shopify and stays out of trouble. A shop with custom fulfilment, subscriptions, or a content side that pays its own way usually wants WooCommerce on a host we trust. Either way, the code stays in your repository and the credentials stay in your password manager.2

Before launch we run the site under load that exceeds your last good month by a factor of three. A store that quietly times out on Black Friday is a store that has been built once and tested zero times. We would rather find the bottleneck on a Tuesday in April.

Includes

  1. i. Platform selection and migration, with no lock-in to our accounts.
  2. ii. Stripe checkout, tax rules, and receipts wired against your business records.
  3. iii. Inventory, product templates, and a CMS the staff can actually use.
  4. iv. Load testing at three times your peak month before the site goes live.

From $2,500.

We don't do novelty. We do what should still work in five years.

Engagement II

Hacked WordPress, back online inside 24 hours.

A recovery, not a rewrite. The site you had before, with the door closed.

The first call is rarely calm. The site is serving spam to Google, the host has suspended the account, and the email going out from the contact form is now landing in junk folders across three continents. We treat the first hour as triage. The site is taken offline, the database is dumped to a clean machine, and the file system is opened up next to a copy of the original theme so the additions become obvious.

The point of the work is not to leave you with a different site. It is to leave you with the site you had before, minus the backdoor. We patch the plugin that let the attacker in, rotate every credential the site knew about, and turn on monitoring so the next attempt sends an alert instead of a ransom note.3 Most jobs are back online inside a business day. The forensic write-up arrives the day after.

We will not pretend the work is glamorous. It is plumbing. But a closed store loses money on the hour, and the only number that matters is how soon it reopens.

Includes

  1. i. Triage and clean isolation of the compromised site within the first hour.
  2. ii. Backdoor identification, malware removal, and patch of the entry vector.
  3. iii. Credential rotation across host, database, admin users, and SMTP.
  4. iv. Monitoring and a written forensic report, delivered the day after relaunch.

From $500.

Engagement III

Hosting bills, audited honestly.

A reading of every invoice you have signed for, with a written report at the end.

The hosting audit started as a favour for an old client who had ended up paying three separate companies to do roughly the same job. By the time we had finished reading the invoices we had cut the bill by sixty per cent without changing a line of code. We turned the favour into a service.

We open every invoice the site touches: the host, the CDN, the email relay, the backup vendor, the half-forgotten plugin marketplace that auto-renewed last March. We work out which line items are doing real work, which are duplicates, and which were sold to a previous developer who has long since moved on. The deliverable is a written report, not a pitch for a migration.4

If the cheapest answer is to leave everything as it is and cancel two subscriptions, that is what the report says. We are not trying to sell you a new platform. We are trying to make sure you know what you are paying for.

Includes

  1. i. A line-by-line review of host, CDN, email, backup, and plugin invoices.
  2. ii. Identification of duplicate services and abandoned subscriptions.
  3. iii. Performance measurement against the plan tier you are paying for.
  4. iv. A written report with prioritised actions and projected annual savings.

From $1,000.

Footnotes

In closing

If one of the three sounds like yours.

A note describing the site, the problem, and the budget if there is one is enough to begin. The first read is free. We will tell you whether we can help, what the work would cost, and when it could start.

Address inquiries to

Pixel Pulse