Your WordPress site is down, and after "can you fix it?" the next question is always "what is this going to cost me?" Fair enough. Here is a straight answer, based on the emergency work I do for businesses across Southampton, Portsmouth, Winchester, Basingstoke and the rest of Hampshire.
The short answer
I bill emergency WordPress support by the hour, at £75 per hour, and only once the problem is fixed. Most emergencies take between one and three hours, so a typical callout lands between £75 and £225. A hacked site that needs a full clean-up usually takes three to eight hours, so £225 to £600. If there is no working backup and data has to be reconstructed, it can be more, and I will tell you that before I start.
You get an estimate after the initial assessment, before any billable work begins. If I cannot fix it, you do not pay.
What you are paying for
An emergency hour is not just the fix. It covers:
- Diagnosis. Finding the actual cause, not the first thing that looks wrong. Most "plugin problems" turn out to be something else.
- A backup before any change. Always. If a fix has to be reversed, there is a clean point to go back to.
- The fix itself, tested on the live site, with the shop or forms checked end to end.
- A written summary of what broke, what I changed and what to do about it.
- Prevention advice. Usually two or three things that would have stopped it happening.
Typical costs by problem
These are the ranges I see most often. Every site is different, but they will tell you whether a quote you have been given is in the right ballpark.
| Problem | Typical time | Typical cost |
|---|---|---|
| White screen or "critical error" after an update | 1–2 hours | £75–£150 |
| Plugin or theme conflict | 1–2 hours | £75–£150 |
| "Error establishing a database connection" | 1–2 hours | £75–£150 |
| Locked out of wp-admin | 0.5–1 hour | £40–£75 |
| WooCommerce checkout or payment failure | 1–4 hours | £75–£300 |
| Hosting migration gone wrong | 2–5 hours | £150–£375 |
| Site very slow or returning 502/504 under load | 2–4 hours | £150–£300 |
| Hacked site, malware clean-up and hardening | 3–8 hours | £225–£600 |
| Data recovery with no usable backup | 4+ hours | Quoted after assessment |
For comparison, UK agencies typically charge £150 to £500 for a standard emergency fix and £300 to £800 or more for a hack clean-up, with the work going through a ticket queue rather than to a named developer.
What pushes the cost up
A few things reliably turn a one-hour job into a four-hour one:
- No working backup. Restoring is fast. Rebuilding is not.
- No hosting access. If nobody knows the hosting login and the previous developer has vanished, recovering access comes first.
- A hack left for weeks. Malware spreads into uploads, the database and cron jobs. The longer it sits, the more there is to find.
- Custom code with no documentation. Bespoke themes and plugins take longer to read before they can be fixed safely.
- Several problems at once. An unmaintained site rarely has just one thing wrong with it.
- Out of hours. I respond to genuine emergencies in the evening and at weekends when I can, but it is best effort rather than guaranteed unless you are on a plan.
Does being in Hampshire change the price?
No. Emergency work is done remotely, so there is no call-out charge and no travel time on the invoice. A business in Fareham pays the same as one in Winchester or Bournemouth. The same goes for Worthing, Brighton and the rest of West Sussex, where I also work with a growing number of local businesses.
What Hampshire does buy you is someone in your time zone who answers the phone. Most of my emergency calls come from business owners who found that their site was down, emailed their old developer, and heard nothing for two days.
How to keep the bill down
You can shave real time off an emergency by having a few things ready when you get in touch:
- The site URL and a description of what you are seeing (a screenshot of the error helps).
- When it started, and anything that changed just before: an update, a new plugin, a hosting change, a new team member.
- Your hosting provider's name and, ideally, the login.
- A WordPress admin username. I will give you a secure way to share the password.
- Whether you have a recent backup, and where it is.
And one thing not to do: stop clicking. Repeatedly re-running updates or deactivating things at random usually adds to the clean-up.
The alternative: never paying for an emergency
One hacked-site clean-up at £400 is more than a year of a Starter maintenance plan. Plans start from £27.99 per month and cover the updates, off-site backups and monitoring that stop most emergencies happening in the first place, and the Premium tier includes emergency support outright. If you have had one emergency already, it is worth looking at my WordPress maintenance plans for Hampshire businesses before the next one.
Need help now?
If your site is down right now, go to the emergency WordPress support page for the quickest way to reach me, or use the contact page with the details above. I will tell you what is wrong and what it will cost before I start.
