Case study · Emergency repair and hosting
Every paid order reaching the team again, and zero lost in the move
A Denver mattress-recycling non-profit's website kept taking paid pickup orders while every notification to staff failed without a word. We found the dead mail connection and fixed it the same day, then moved the site to faster hosting with every order record intact.
- Client
- A Denver mattress-recycling non-profit
- Engagement
- July 2026 to now
- Services
- Emergency Repair, Email Deliverability, Hosting Migration, Website Care Plan
The business problem
Customers book and pay for mattress pickups on the organization's website, and each booking sends a notification to the scheduling inbox so a truck gets assigned. In June those notifications stopped. The site stayed up, customers kept paying, and nothing showed an error anywhere: no warning on the site, no bounce to the customer, no alert to staff. The site's email ran through an outside account that nobody at the organization held a login for, and the WordPress administrator account and the site's admin notices pointed at the original builder's personal Gmail. The warnings a site owner is supposed to receive were leaving the building. Customers were calling, angry, and the operations lead had time off coming with no way to know if bookings were landing.
What we built
We reviewed the site’s email log on July 20: 93 of 93 sends that week had failed, which is a dead mail connection, not a spam problem. The same afternoon we moved the site's mail onto the organization's own Google Workspace, sending as the scheduling mailbox the team already watches, corrected the domain's SPF record, published DMARC, and checked the notification routing on all three payment forms one at a time. Next we moved the site off a shared server and onto managed WordPress hosting at WP Engine, step by step over SSH so any step could be retried without touching the live site. The cutover ran on July 30, three weeks ahead of plan, with all 763 order records carried over. The organization has been on a monthly care plan since July 21, with a site-health check every day and a report every other Friday built from the site's own order and mail records.
The Outcome
Order notifications were delivering again on July 20, 2026, the day the mail log was read. Hosting cut over July 30, 2026: the old server served the same homepage in anywhere from 1.3 to 10.9 seconds within one session; on the new host it loaded in 0.07. 763 order records moved, zero orders lost. 230 paid pickup bookings came through the site between the cutover and October 2, 2026, and 102 of 102 site emails delivered in the two weeks to October 2, none failed. The organization's website takes paid pickup bookings and every one reaches the scheduling team, on managed hosting under a monthly care plan.