Hire PHP developers for the code nobody dares touch

There is no hourly rate. We agree a written piece of work with dates and a single price, and that price holds. What moves the figure is how readable the code turns out to be: how many separate ways in it has, whether the outside parts it relies on were installed properly or copied in by hand, how many of your business rules are hidden in the page designs, and how much of it anyone still with you can explain. Tidy code with an owner is a small number. Describe what it does and where it came from and you get a range on the call itself.

That is your decision. Take everything and run it yourself, and you leave with the map, the recorded walkthrough and access to every account we opened. Or keep us on for a monthly fee: we watch it, fix what breaks within an agreed time, apply security updates, do further work as you want it and send a written report each month. We offer the second option for a reason. Code that gets attention for a while and then none slides straight back to being the thing nobody will touch, and the notes go stale beside it.

Yes, that is how it is set up to run. We take access to your code and work in small pieces through whatever review your team already does, in your task list and your catch-ups. On inherited code we deliberately match what is already there: the naming, the layout, the way errors are handled. Where a pattern is costing you money, we say so, put a price on changing it and wait for your decision. Nothing gets rewritten quietly because we preferred it another way. If you would rather we worked at arm's length and handed over at the end, that works too.

Current supported PHP, Laravel where it is in play, and WordPress. Just as important for this page: plain PHP with no framework at all, and homemade frameworks with no name and no manual, which is what a great many long-lived business applications genuinely run on. If yours is on a version that no longer receives security fixes, we tell you what that means for everything else on the list, because it changes the cost of each other item. And if PHP is honestly not where this thing should live any more, you hear that on the first call rather than after we have taken the work.

By reading it and writing down what we read. We pick the routes that carry the most business, checkout, invoicing or dispatch, and follow each one end to end: the way in, the pieces it pulls in, the records it writes, the email or file it produces on the way out. That trace becomes a document you keep. Only then do we put checks around the behavior as it stands today, including the parts that look wrong, because the first job is being able to tell whether a change altered anything at all. Editing code nobody understands is how a small fix becomes a day of downtime.

Usually within a couple of weeks once the price is signed off. What we need first is access: the code, a copy of the records with realistic information in them, somewhere that is not your live setup to run it, and logins for the outside services it calls. After that, one person who can answer "is it supposed to do that?" when we find something odd, which in code this old comes up early and often. If nobody left in the business can answer that, tell us at the start. It does not stop the work, but it changes how we plan it.