Emergency Web Developer: What It Costs, How Fast Help Starts

If your website, web shop or app is down, spend the first 15 minutes ruling out the causes nobody needs to be paid for: a platform outage, an expired domain or SSL certificate, or the last change someone made. If it is still down after that, call a developer who can start today. Emergency developer help is almost always billed per hour, and out of hours many providers charge 1.5 to 2 times their normal rate, often with a minimum. At We Do Dev Work a senior developer starts the same day for $85 per hour, with no minimum and no intake.

This guide is for any stack: Shopify and WooCommerce shops, Laravel, Node or other custom web apps, and the backends behind mobile apps. If you run WordPress, we have two shorter checklists: my WordPress website went offline and WordPress site hacked.

The first 15 minutes: what you can check yourself

Most top results for "website down" tell you to stay calm and call your host. That is a start, but a lot of outages are not the host's problem at all. Work down this list and write down what you find, with times. It saves the developer time, and their time is what you pay for.

1. Confirm it is really down. Open the site on your phone over mobile data, not office Wi-Fi. Ask someone in another location. Take a screenshot of the exact error message or code.
2. Check the status pages. Your hosting or cloud provider has one. Shopify publishes shopifystatus.com with separate lines for Admin, Checkout, Storefront and API & Mobile, though it notes that issues affecting a small share of stores may not show there. If you use Cloudflare, check cloudflarestatus.com. Check your payment provider too if only checkout is failing. If the platform itself is down, no developer can fix it faster than the platform; your job is to tell customers.
3. Read the error code. If you see a Cloudflare error page, the number tells you where to look. Cloudflare's documentation describes 521 as "web server is down", 522 as a connection timeout, 523 as origin unreachable and 525/526 as SSL problems on your server. In all of these, Cloudflare is working; your server is the problem.
4. Check the domain. Look up your domain with your registrar or a WHOIS tool. When a domain expires, the website and usually the email stop. For most generic domains registrars may offer a renewal grace period of around 29 days, but it is not guaranteed, and country domains follow their own registry's rules. Renew immediately.
5. Check the SSL certificate. A full-page "your connection is not private" warning usually means an expired or wrong certificate. Certificates are getting shorter lives: since 15 March 2026 the maximum for public certificates is 200 days, dropping to 100 days in March 2027 and 47 days in March 2029 (timeline). Renewal has to be automatic, and a broken auto-renewal is now a more common cause of outages.
6. Ask what changed. A deploy, an app or plugin update, a theme edit, a DNS change, a new payment setting, a hosting invoice that bounced. Most outages follow a change. Find out when, and who made it.
7. Tell your customers. A short post or banner ("checkout is down, we are on it, order by phone or email") costs nothing and keeps orders coming in.

What to have ready for the developer

An emergency developer is fastest when they do not have to chase you for logins. Have this ready before you call:

• Access: hosting or cloud console, code repository, CMS or Shopify admin, domain registrar and DNS, payment provider dashboard. Create a staff or collaborator account where you can, instead of sharing the owner password, and remove it afterwards.
• The facts: when it started, the exact error, screenshots, which pages or features are affected, and whether it is everyone or some users.
• What changed: the list from step 6 above, plus the deploy history if you have one.
• Logs: server and application logs, an error tracker if you use one, and where your backups are and when the last one ran.
• A decision maker: one person who can approve hours, a rollback or a short planned outage.

Problem, likely cause, who to call

We did not find reliable published figures for typical repair times, so the last column describes what the fix usually involves rather than promising hours. For scale: one US agency's published price list puts plugin conflicts and broken forms at 2 to 6 hours of work, and complete outages or major hack recovery at 20 hours or more (Solspace).

What emergency developer help costs

Prices vary widely, and most providers hide them until you call. These are the models you will meet, with published examples:

• Hourly with an emergency premium. Rocket.net, a WordPress hosting company writing for agencies, says US WordPress rates run $80 to $200 an hour, with emergency work often at twice the standard rate. Its example table uses $125 standard and $250 for emergency response, and it mentions a common 2-hour minimum for incidents outside business hours (source).
• Out-of-hours surcharge. New Zealand agency Spinning Planet charges NZ$140 an hour normally and NZ$250 for out-of-hours work or work that jumps the queue (source). UK service Website Helper charges £30 an hour in office hours and £60 out of hours, with no minimum block (source).
• Per incident, fixed after an assessment. Solspace quotes $495 to $1,195 for small emergencies, $1,195 to $2,395 for medium ones such as checkout failures, and $3,995 or more for complete outages, with a fixed price agreed before work starts. Its after-hours requests are handled the next business day.
• Retainer or maintenance plan. Many agencies only do emergency work for clients on a monthly plan. Solspace's monitoring retainer starts at $3,500 a month.

Before you say yes to anyone, ask four things: is there a minimum, is there an after-hours premium, when does the clock start, and who actually does the work.

Our prices

A worked example: a failed deploy that takes three hours to roll back and fix costs $255 with our emergency rate. At the $250 emergency rate in Rocket.net's example, the same three hours would be $750. A senior developer fixes first and explains after: what broke, why, and what would stop it happening again. You keep the code; we work in your repository.

How to decide who to call

• The platform is down (Shopify, your cloud provider, Cloudflare, your payment provider): wait, communicate, and keep an eye on the status page.
• Domain, certificate or hosting account: start with the registrar or host. Call a developer if renewal does not bring the site back.
• It broke after a change: call whoever made the change, if they can start today. If they cannot, or if nobody knows what changed, call an emergency developer.
• Your developer or agency is unreachable: that is exactly what emergency help is for. Have the access list ready and we can start without them.
• You think you were hacked: do not restore a backup over it before someone has looked; you can lose the evidence of how they got in. See the hacked site checklist.
• This is the second fire this quarter: stop paying emergency rates. A strip card or subscription is cheaper per hour and gets you a developer who already knows your setup.

How to avoid the next one

• Monitoring: an uptime check every minute or few minutes, plus alerts for domain and SSL expiry. You want to hear about an outage from a tool, not from a customer.
• Auto-renew with a valid card on your domain and hosting, and an email address that someone actually reads.
• Safe releases: a staging environment, a way to roll back in minutes, and no big releases right before a weekend or a sale (our Black Friday checklist covers shops).
• Tested backups: a backup you have never restored is a hope, not a backup.
• An access list: who has the logins for hosting, domain, code and payments, kept somewhere safe.
• A developer on the shelf: a strip card or a subscription means the next call goes to someone who already knows your system. Our website maintenance cost guide compares the options.

Want to know where your site is weakest before something breaks? EngineeringScore runs a free audit of security, performance, SEO, accessibility and reliability.

Something broken right now?

Send us what you see on the emergency help page. You do not need to know the cause. A senior developer picks it up the same day, at $85 an hour with no minimum, and tells you what is going on before the hours add up. If this keeps happening, look at our prices for a strip card or subscription instead.