Site Rescue
A site that just stopped working.
We bring it back.
Most small businesses don't need a fresh start. They need their existing site brought back to the standard it was built to. We survey what's there, keep what's worth keeping, and modernise the rest: copy, photographs, brand, customer history. All preserved. Wrapped in bones that work in 2026.
The condition assessment.
Every rescue begins with a survey of the existing fabric. Below is a worked example. Whitfield & Sons is invented; every defect in the table is one we find on real sites of this age. The real rescue, with real pages, is further down.
A site like this isn't worth a rebuild from zero. The brief is still here. The brand, the founder's voice, the photographs of the workshop, the testimonials from the 2017 commission and the 2019 refit are all worth keeping. What needs replacing is the wrapper around them: the layout that breaks on phones, the SSL that expired, the form that doesn't reach a real mailbox. That's what restoration is for.
Stages of restoration.
Restoration follows a fixed sequence. Each stage gates the next: nothing is modernised before the originals have been catalogued, nothing is shipped before the new site has been audited side-by-side with the old.
Capture everything, lose nothing.
We crawl every page of the existing site and archive its full state: markup, assets, photographs, copy, links, metadata. The original is archived in full; we never overwrite or delete from the live site. If we get the modernise stage wrong, we can put it back.
- HTML across all pages
- Images at original dpi
- Copy fragments and paragraphs
- Forms and field labels
- Internal link graph
- Existing metadata and schema
Grade what's salvageable.
Each captured asset is graded against modern standards for accessibility, performance, mobile fitness, SEO and security. Each is marked keep, refresh, or replace. The audit becomes the working contract for the next three stages: nothing the customer wanted to keep gets quietly dropped.
- WCAG 2.2 contrast and motion
- Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP)
- Mobile usability ≥ 320px width
- Discoverability and schema
- Tone of voice consistency
- Contact-path reachability
Lift the real material out.
Whatever was graded keep or refresh in the audit gets pulled forward. Copy is re-typeset; photographs are re-cropped to current ratios and uplifted in resolution where possible; testimonials and customer history are preserved verbatim. Voice is sacred: if the founder wrote it, we keep their words.
- Founder's body copy
- Original photographs (at higher dpi)
- Customer testimonials, dated
- Service / product list
- Hours, location, contact details
- Brand colour and typography intent
New bones, same building.
A modern site is generated around the lifted content, with responsive layout, current performance budgets, accessible components and fresh navigation. The visual register matches the brand; the voice matches the founder; the structure matches what the customer actually offers. It feels like the same business, run by the same person, in 2026 instead of 2014.
- Responsive layout, mobile-first
- Performance under 2s LCP
- Accessibility passes WCAG 2.2 AA
- Fresh navigation and IA
- Modern contact + booking patterns
- Schema for local search
Hand-off, without the hand-wringing.
Domain swap, SSL renewal, redirects from every old URL to its new equivalent so search rankings don't collapse. The old site retires gracefully; yours goes live with no visible downtime. You wake up to the new site, with the old links still working. We watch it closely for the first 48 hours.
- DNS swap, planned window
- 301 redirects from every old URL
- SSL renewal automated
- Sitemap submitted to search
- 48-hour heightened monitoring
- Old site archived in full
Before & after.
Three pages from Victory Consulting, a defence consultancy in Worthing and our first paid rescue: surveyed on Sunday 5 July 2026, live on the firm's own domain by the Tuesday. No mock-ups and no retouching: the ‘as found’ display is the survey's own capture, the ‘as archived’ displays are the Internet Archive's February 2024 records verified word-for-word against the survey, and every restoration is the page as it serves today. Click any pair to read the full case study.
What we keep, what we replace.
Restoration is editing, not rewriting. The brief, the brand and the customer history belong to you. The wrapper around them is what we're here to fix.
- Body copy: every paragraph the founder wrote.
- Photographs: uplifted in resolution where originals exist.
- Brand: colours, typography intent, voice register.
- Customer testimonials: verbatim, dated, attributed.
- Service or product list: restructured for clarity, not edited for content.
- Contact details: hours, location, phone, email.
- Founding story: page architecture, names, dates.
- Existing URLs: redirected, so old links still work.
- Search rankings: preserved through structured 301s.
- Layout: fixed-width desktop, replaced with responsive 2026 bones.
- Performance: modern build pipeline, edge caching, optimised assets.
- Accessibility: colour contrast, focus rings, reduced-motion paths.
- Hosting: shared, oversold servers, replaced with enterprise infrastructure.
- SSL: expired or absent, renewed automatically going forward.
- Contact form: broken or unreachable, routed to a working address.
- Metadata & schema: missing or outdated, brought up to current standards.
- Mobile experience: broken below 480px, rebuilt mobile-first.
- Browser compatibility: old polyfills retired, modern baselines adopted.
The rate schedule.
Rescue is priced by the page, not by the cycle. You pay for what we restore. No project minimum, no setup fee, no retainer required. Add an ongoing subscription if you'd like the site looked after going forward.
Per page
£20/page
Counted from the existing sitemap. Legal pages (privacy, terms, cookies) are excluded from the count and brought across at no charge.
Per blog post
£10/post
Half the page rate, because most blog posts are body copy without bespoke layout. Categories, tags, and post archive included in the per-page page count.
- Full crawl & archive
- Asset uplift
- 301 redirect map
- SSL renewal
- Sitemap submission
- 48-hour heightened monitoring
- Old site archived in full
- Editorial review pass
Where we are, honestly.
Site Rescue is open to a first cohort of customers now. The Whitfield survey above is a worked example; the before-and-afters are real: our first paid rescue, shipped in July 2026. We're not yet sitting on a wall of testimonials. That's the honest framing.
If you've a site you'd like assessed, write a brief and we'll start with a free condition survey. No commitment, no charge until you approve a plan. More customer work will land here as the first cohort ships. The first is up: read the Victory Consulting case study.
If your site has stopped working for you, for your customers, or for your business, write us a brief and we'll survey it within the week, no charge.
Begin a briefYours,Chris Painter · Themesmith · August 2026