Website rescue · Adoptions welcome · Worldwide, from PEI
The site from 1995 that still brings in calls. The rebuild your developer vanished halfway through. The CMS you are locked out of. The plugin graveyard the last agency left behind. NeuroLabs adopts websites in that condition, gets them working, and keeps them working — from Charlottetown, PEI, for clients worldwide.
01 / SymptomsIn your words, not ours
These are the sentences people actually open with. Any one of them is enough to start a conversation — you do not need to diagnose the problem before you call.
The site still works, roughly. The platform underneath it stopped getting updates a long time ago, the theme is unsupported, and no one is confident enough to change anything.
Half a rebuild, no documentation, no handover, and an invoice you already paid. What exists and what was promised are two different lists, and nobody has written either one down.
The company that built it no longer exists. The accounts are in somebody else’s name, the emails bounce, and the renewal notice goes somewhere you cannot see.
You own the business, the brand and the content, and you cannot change a phone number on your own homepage without asking a stranger who may not answer.
Thirty-odd plugins, several abandoned by their authors, two doing the same job, one holding the checkout together. Updating anything is a gamble, so nothing gets updated.
It looked finished in the preview and behaves differently in the world. That has its own playbook — see AI app rescue for platform-specific failure modes.
02 / MethodDiagnosis before quote, quote before code
No fixed bids on unknowns. An inherited site cannot be honestly priced sight-unseen, so the diagnosis comes first and it is paid work — not a sales call in disguise.
We go through the site the way an inspector goes through a house: what it is built on, what still updates, what is broken, what is exposed, who owns which account, and what it would take to run it safely. You get a written report you keep either way.
The diagnosis becomes a scope, and the scope becomes one number. Flat, written, agreed before any code is touched. No hourly meter running in the background, no change-order surcharges bolted on later.
Then the actual work: targeted repair where the foundation is sound, a hand-built rebuild where it is not, a real launch either way, and maintenance afterward so the site does not rot back into the state you found it in.
03 / OwnershipFive assets, all of them yours
Most rescues start with a recovery problem rather than a code problem. Here is the chain we work through, and what it takes to put your name back on each link.
Honest limits
Saying no early is cheaper for both of us than saying yes badly. A rescue only works when we can actually reach the assets, and when the result is something a small studio can stand behind for years — not just ship and walk away from.
Why trust a rescue to us
NeuroLabs operates six live web products of its own — ScamCallCheck, TheCareer, CalcNow, LenderReady, Down East Music and VINscan. The maintenance practice behind every rescue comes from keeping those in production, not from a slide about process.
The published rebuild is Down East Music: a stock Wix template turned into a custom site. Read the case study.
04 / QuestionsWebsite rescue, answered
A website rescue is a structured takeover of a site somebody else built and nobody is maintaining. It covers establishing what the site actually is and where it lives, recovering the accounts you own, deciding honestly whether to repair or rebuild, doing the work, and keeping it running afterward. It is ordinary work here — the site everyone else politely declines is usually the one where careful work matters most.
Yes. Adopting half-finished builds is routine. We take over the code, hosting, domains and accounts, establish what exists versus what was promised, and give you a written plan and a firm price to finish it. If we start it, we finish it — no vanishing acts.
That is exactly what the paid, time-boxed diagnosis answers. Some sites are structurally sound and need targeted repair. Others are held together by abandoned plugins and a platform that no longer updates, and repairing them costs more than replacing them. You get the answer in writing, with the reasoning, before you commit to the larger job.
That is one of the most common reasons people call. We work through the ownership chain with you — domain registration and WHOIS, hosting account, CMS administrator access, DNS, and the code repository — and get you named as the owner of record. You should control every one of those assets when the work is done, whether or not we keep working together.
Rescues are quoted flat and in writing after the paid, time-boxed diagnosis, because nobody can honestly price an inherited codebase sight-unseen. New builds start from $1,500 CAD. We do not bill hourly and we do not add change-order surcharges to a quote we already gave you.
Yes, and we prefer to. Launch is the start of operations, not the finish line. Ongoing care — hosting, updates, monitoring and changes — is available after every project. We also decline rescues we would not be able to maintain afterward, because handing back an unmaintainable site is how it broke the first time.
How bad is it? No judgment — we have seen worse. Describe the business, the mess, and the outcome you need, and you will get a direct reply.