Bus-Koncert

Bus-Koncert had a WordPress site. It existed, it loaded and it looked like a working service — but the key feature, ride booking, did not work.

That is the worst kind of failure. A site that does not come up at all is an obvious problem and somebody deals with it. A site that looks fine and quietly fails to do the one thing customers come for can lose sales for months before anybody counts how many.

Four weeks. The deadline was fixed.

A budget for a rebuild, not for a new product. That narrowed the options: redesigning everything from scratch was off the table. We had to decide what stays and what gets replaced — and justify it with numbers rather than preference.

The first instinct with a broken feature is to fix what is there. On WordPress that usually means swapping a plugin, working around a conflict and moving on.

We advised against it. Booking was assembled from components nobody maintained, and previous repairs had left a layer of workarounds behind them. Each new patch would have held until the next update.

In that state a rebuild is cheaper over a year than patching, even though it looks more expensive in the first month. That difference has to be shown to the client, because from their side only the higher up-front cost is visible.

At the same time we did not rebuild everything from scratch — the budget was for a rebuild, and that set what stayed untouched.

Ride booking works — the site finally does what it exists for.

Visibility in search improved as well. That is a typical side effect of moving off a neglected WordPress install: a new site structure, correct URLs and faster loading change the SEO picture too, even when that was not the project's main goal.