Keep the site rolling.
Even with the best will — and work — in the world, an e-commerce site can hit the proverbial iceberg now and then. If a site is made well, with quality part of the process from the start rather than an afterthought, problems should be rare: code is code — it doesn’t change on its own.
But other things do. Third-party integrations and APIs, add-ons that weren’t tested properly, a poorly mapped migration: there are still plenty of ways to wreak havoc on even the best-behaved site. And all of that assumes the site was well made in the first place — sadly, a lot aren’t. Which is why we offer bench days.
The Workshop is agency-grade help — platforms, code, SEO, copy, the lot — in a more flexible arrangement than you’ve probably been offered before. There’s no retainer and no proposal deck: you book the days, we get to work.
It comes from where we come from: eighteen years building and running independent shops, including our own. We know what it feels like when the site misbehaves and there’s nobody sensible to call — we’ve been the maker staring at the admin at midnight. That’s the mindset this service is built on.
What a bench day is
A bench day is a full day of our attention on your site, priced at £500. It starts with exploration — reproduce the fault, trace it to the cause — and ends with fixes. You get the hours, the repairs a day can hold, and a written summary at the end: what was done, what was found, what remains.
One day won’t transform your business, and we won’t pretend otherwise. What it will very often do is get you unstuck — the fault traced to its cause and, more often than not, fixed before the day is out. This isn’t an emergency service; it’s for when you need real help, quite quickly, from a safe pair of hands.
Work starts within two working days of booking. If you’re properly stuck there’s a box to tick at the checkout — it doesn’t cost more; it just tells us who to call first.
Repair times
Every seizure is different, but after eighteen years the patterns repeat. Typical times, from experience:
| Fault | Typical bench time |
|---|---|
| Checkout seized — payments failing or abandoning | 1 day |
| Theme or app update broke the front end | 1 day |
| Site slowed to a crawl | 1–2 days |
| Rankings fell off a cliff after a change | 2–3 days |
| Migration gone wrong — broken collections, dead URLs | 2–3 days |
| Email landing in spam, domain records in a mess | 1 day |
| Analytics telling you nothing you can use | 1 day |
| Don’t know what’s wrong — it’s just wrong | 1 day (diagnosis day) |
That last row matters: a single day spent finding out what’s actually wrong is the cheapest decision-making tool we sell. And anything past five days is usually a project wearing a disguise — that deserves a proper conversation and a proper quote, not a checkout.
How it works
Book your days. Choose one to five below and check out with Stripe. £500 a day, plus VAT where applicable.
Tell us the symptoms. A short job card follows the payment: what’s wrong, what platform, when it last worked. No passwords — ever.
Grant access from your side. You invite us in — a Shopify collaborator request, a WordPress admin invite, Analytics access — and you can show us out the moment the job’s done.
We get to work. Diagnosis first, fixes second. At the end of each day you get a plain-English summary: fixed, found, remaining.
The no-passwords point isn’t small print — it’s the arrangement. Every platform lets you invite a collaborator and revoke them; anyone who asks you to email a password instead is telling you something about how they run their workshop.
Book the bench
Stripe checkout · plus VAT where applicable · work starts within two working days · covered by the first-hour rule · the small print
Not sure what to book?
Tell us what’s wrong — or what you thinkis wrong — and we’ll write back with a straight read on how many days it looks like, or whether it’s a bigger job. A real reply within two working days; sooner if you’re stuck.