The system that still runs the business, and nobody wants to touch
Maintaining and modernising legacy business systems.
A great many businesses depend on a PHP application written years ago by someone who has long since moved on. It works, it is critical, and every proposal they receive says rewrite it from scratch.
A full rewrite is sometimes right, but it is rarely the cheapest correct answer and it is always the riskiest. We start by reviewing what exists — structure, dependencies, security exposure, how much of it is genuinely used — and give you an honest recommendation, including when leaving it alone and patching is the sensible choice.
Where modernisation makes sense we do it in stages: secure it, get it onto a supported PHP version, add tests around the parts that matter, then replace components one at a time while the business keeps running. You are never asked to switch everything over on a single date.
What we do with PHP & MySQL
- ✓Legacy PHP application support and bug fixing
- ✓Upgrades to supported PHP versions
- ✓Security review and hardening
- ✓MySQL performance tuning and query optimisation
- ✓Staged migration to a modern framework
- ✓Database schema clean-up and migration
- ✓Documentation of undocumented systems
- ✓Adding test coverage to untested code
Questions
Should we rewrite or maintain our legacy system?
It depends on how much of it still fits the business. We review first and tell you honestly — including when patching is the cheaper answer, even though a rebuild would be worth more to us.
Our developer left and nobody understands the code. Can you help?
Yes. That is a common starting point. The first piece of work is usually a review and written documentation so the business is no longer dependent on one person's memory.
Can you upgrade PHP without breaking everything?
Usually. We audit for deprecated functions and incompatible dependencies, upgrade in steps on a staging copy, and test before anything reaches production.
Tell us what you are trying to fix
Send us a short description of the problem and we will come back within one working day with a straight answer on whether we can help, roughly what it would take, and what it is likely to cost.