Stuck, not broken.
The checkout that worked on Friday. The rankings that fell off a cliff after the redesign. The migration someone started and didn’t finish. Most sites don’t need a new site — they need two good days from someone who’s seen the fault before.
The Workshop is agency-grade help — platforms, code, SEO, copy, the lot — in a more flexible arrangement than you’ve probably been offered before. No retainer, no proposal deck, no minimum engagement. Pick your days, tell us the symptoms, and 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: real problems, solved with some empathy, by people who’ve had the same week you’re having.
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 checkout unseized, the migration unpicked, the thing that’s been quietly leaking orders found and fixed. 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, honestly estimated:
| 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 an honest 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.