Twenty years, and still carrying the business
The site had been running for more than twenty years. It still brought in work. It still represented a real business with real customers. And it was running on software that had not been maintained in a very long time.
On life support, and everyone knew it
Not broken, exactly. Fragile. The kind of fragile where you stop making changes because change is what usually kills these sites. The owner had learned not to touch it, which is a way of living with a problem rather than fixing it.
Age is not the danger on its own. The danger is the combination: old software, no maintenance available, nobody left who understands it, and a business depending on it anyway. One security problem, one host upgrade, one failed disk, and twenty years of work is a conversation with a backup nobody has ever tested.
What we did
We copied it first, before anything else, so the twenty years existed somewhere safe. We worked out what the site genuinely did for the business, which is never quite what the pages suggest. Then we rebuilt it on current foundations, carried the content across, and handed it over properly.
The part owners do not expect: the relief is not about appearance. It is about being able to change your mind again. Add a page. Update a price. Fix a typo on a Tuesday. After years of avoidance, that is the thing people mention.
If this sounds like yours, you are in ordinary company: in our own rebuild work the figure is 62%, each one past a decade old with nobody left who knows how it was made.