Hereford is a small city a long way from anywhere large. The nearest agency markets of any size are Worcester, Cheltenham, Cardiff and Birmingham, which tends to leave Hereford businesses choosing between city rates for a supplier who will never visit, or whoever was available locally at the time.
I am one developer, working across Herefordshire from just over the Worcestershire border. New sites are written by hand rather than built in Elementor or Divi, and existing sites, whatever they were built with, can be taken on, repaired and maintained.
The two things people ask for
A site that actually works on a bad connection. Hereford businesses serve a rural catchment. Your visitors are not all on fibre in the city centre; plenty are on a phone somewhere between here and Kington. Hand-written code means a smaller page, and a smaller page is the whole game on a weak connection. More on that on the Herefordshire page.
Someone reliable to keep it going. This is the more common request. A care plan covers updates, tested backups, security and performance monitoring for a fixed monthly fee, with a response time you can hold someone to.
What a site rescue actually involves
Most Hereford enquiries are rescues rather than rebuilds. It is worth knowing what that looks like before you commit to anything, because it is less dramatic than most quotes imply:
- Get you back in control. Domain, hosting and site logins traced and transferred into your name. Occasionally this is the entire job.
- Take a full backup before touching anything. Files and database, stored off the server, restored once to prove it works.
- Update carefully, in order. Core, then plugins, then theme, on a copy first. Not all at once on the live site on a Friday.
- Strip what is not earning its place. Deactivated plugins, abandoned sliders, three analytics scripts doing the same job.
- Fix the things quietly broken. The contact form nobody has tested, the SSL warning on one page, the 404s pointing at pages you deleted in 2022.
After that, the site is either fine, which is the usual outcome, or the case for rebuilding it is obvious and evidence-based rather than a sales pitch.
Who this suits in Herefordshire
Food and drink producers, farm shops and cider makers. Tourism and hospitality around the Wye Valley, where the site is competing with booking platforms for the direct enquiry. Trades and rural service businesses whose customers find them on a phone. Solicitors, accountants and consultancies in the city where the site is a credibility check.
If you are none of those, that is fine. The work is the same regardless of sector.
New builds
When a replacement is genuinely the right call, it is built from clean PHP and a real theme, editable afterwards in the standard WordPress editor with no builder licence to keep renewing. The development page covers how that works.
Nearby
County overview: Herefordshire, covering Leominster, Ross-on-Wye, Ledbury, Bromyard and Kington. Over the border: Worcestershire and Worcester.
Not sure whether your Hereford site is worth saving? Describe the symptoms and you will get an honest read on it, including if the answer is that nothing needs doing.