Stabilizing a WooCommerce Platform After a Previous Developer's Core Modifications

The situation

An online education academy running on WordPress and WooCommerce came to me with a site that was losing them money in several directions at once. A subscription purchase button had disappeared from the live site, directly cutting off revenue. PHP memory errors crashed every attempt to export order reports, which was blocking their accountant from completing year-end taxes. Worst of all, logged-in users were occasionally seeing other subscribers’ dashboards and personal details.

Underneath was classic accumulated debt. A previous developer had edited core plugin files directly, in the membership plugin and a coupon plugin, so every update silently broke custom behavior. The web root was littered with duplicate installs and old backup archives, and WordPress core, themes, and plugins were all badly out of date.

What I did

I treated it as a stabilization project rather than a list of tickets. I re-established clean, separate development and live environments and cleared the legacy debris from the server. I updated core, themes, and plugins in a controlled sequence, then rebuilt the previous developer’s customizations properly, moving the membership discount logic out of hacked plugin files and into update-safe code. I restored the missing subscription purchase flow, resolved the PHP memory failures so financial reports could be exported, corrected the session behavior exposing user data, and fixed SSL and payment gateway issues with their credit card processor.

The outcome

The client got their revenue path back, their tax reports out, and the data exposure closed. More durably, they got a site where updates no longer destroy custom functionality, because nothing custom lives inside third-party code anymore. That structural fix is the actual rescue.