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The email from the shop owner was short. A customer had written in, fairly cross, saying checkout was broken. They’d tried four times. Card details in, press Place order, a red message at the top, nothing else. Could I have a look? I had a look. Checkout worked. The shop owner had already had a

The Slack message arrived mid-morning. “Can you just add a field on checkout? One checkbox. Gift wrap. Half an hour?” I’ve heard that sentence enough times that I should have a stock reply. I didn’t that day. The shop looked calm. Theme was stable. Orders were coming in. A boolean on the order form felt

A client’s supervisor said it the way a lot of people say it after a long stocktake. “We’ve got the spreadsheet. Just overwrite the stock.” They meant well. The physical counts were done. The differences were circled in red. Someone had already opened Products in wp-admin and was ready to type numbers in, line by

I was halfway down a warehouse aisle with a client’s counter when the tablet stopped loading Search. Not “slow.” Dead. Status showed offline. The warehouse Wi-Fi had given up again — same dead patch near the far racking where it always drops. Nobody panicked. We already had a stock check open. So we kept counting.

A client rings me because the shop has gone dark. Not “a bit slow.” Dark. Checkout dead. Homepage blank. Or worse — the site still loads, but customers land on a “this domain is for sale” parking page from a registrar they’ve never heard of. My first instinct used to be the WordPress login. Check