Emergency WordPress support · Real estate (luxury)

How we restored a broken payment gateway on a luxury real estate site without losing a single enquiry

A booking deposit gateway stopped charging cards after a payment plugin auto update. Enquiries kept coming in, none were converting. We restored payments in under 2 hours, recovered every pending enquiry, and shipped a permanent integration fix. Full recorded evidence is available on request during a discovery call.

<2 hrs
From first call to payments live
0
Lost enquiries during the outage
100%
Pending deposits recovered manually

The challenge

An overnight auto update to the payment gateway plugin broke the handoff to the merchant account. Cards were authorised but never captured. The team only noticed when reconciling the next day. Roughly 20 booking enquiries had stalled mid checkout.

What we did

  1. 1

    Pulled the gateway debug log and isolated a deprecated API call in the new plugin version.

  2. 2

    Pinned the plugin to the prior stable release and disabled auto update on payment critical plugins.

  3. 3

    Walked every stalled enquiry through a manual capture from the merchant dashboard with the client's approval.

  4. 4

    Wrote a monitoring rule to alert if any future plugin update touches the gateway integration.

The result

Payments were live again under 2 hours after the first call. Every pending deposit was captured. No enquiries were lost. The client added a policy to never auto update payment plugins and we now stage every payment plugin update first.

Two hours from the call to working payments. We did not lose a single enquiry. Client identity withheld under NDA. Full Loom recording and dated evidence are available on request during a 15 minute discovery call.
Operations director · Luxury real estate brand (identity withheld under NDA)

Common questions

Why did the auto update break payments?

The new plugin version used a newer gateway API endpoint that the merchant account had not been upgraded to. Auto updates do not check downstream integration compatibility.

Should I disable all auto updates?

No. We recommend auto updates for low risk plugins and staged manual updates for anything touching payments, checkout, or membership logic.

Want a recovery like this?

Evidence on request

Every fix is recorded. Every outcome is verifiable.

We have 500 plus recorded engineer sessions covering migrations, malware cleanups, speed wins, and emergency recoveries. Most clients are under NDA, so we cannot publish them publicly. On a 20 minute discovery call we will show you the recordings, dashboards, and before and after numbers most relevant to your situation.

  • Loom walkthroughs of real client recoveries, narrated by the engineer who did the work.
  • Anonymised case files with PageSpeed, GSC, and uptime evidence, NDA respected.
  • References from named clients available on the call when there is a fit.

On your discovery call you will see

500+

Recorded fixes

150+

Sites managed

100%

Confidential

Book a 20 minute call

No pitch. We will show evidence relevant to your site.

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