A farm store that stays safe and keeps selling
Secret Lands Farm is a family farm that sells sheep's milk cheese, lamb and farm experiences from their website. There is no one on the farm to look after the technical side, and they wanted two things: nobody breaks in, and customers can always buy.
Where they started
Their store ran on an older setup that had grown slow. Updates were a worry. Skip them and the site gets easier to break into. Install them and something might stop working, with no one around to fix it. Pages took long enough to open that shoppers gave up, and the shipping calculator was quietly charging some customers the wrong rate.
What changed
We built a new server, wrote the migration plan step by step and moved the store across on a quiet night. Images and video were recompressed so pages open quickly, including on a phone. Daily backups go offsite, encrypted. When someone flooded the site and knocked it over in the first month, we built a watcher that spots the same pattern and blocks it before the store notices. Now every update is tried on a test copy of the store first. If anything breaks, it is undone automatically and the real store is never touched. We watch the site day and night and we watch the shop itself too, so if the cart, the shipping cost or the checkout stops working we know within minutes. When someone spent weeks trying to break into the site, we tracked it, confirmed nothing got through and closed every gap they had tried.
The store itself
A farm store needs more than a server. We rewrote the shipping plugin so local delivery covers the right postal codes, free delivery kicks in at the right order size, and an order can no longer slip through with no shipping charged at all. When the courier changed their system, we rebuilt the connection the same week. We set up the farm tour and brunch bookings, the sheep milk membership discounts, the Christmas preorders, the hiring page and the SMS signup form, then photographed and listed every wheel of aged cheese. For a stretch we ran their online advertising too, and we have spent our share of Saturdays at the farm and the markets. The owners send a question about a strange email or a stuck payment and get an answer, not a ticket number.
Today
The store has stayed open and kept taking orders. One update did break the shop, on the test copy, and the live site never saw it. Once a month the owners get a short, readable note on what we found, what we fixed and anything they need to decide.
We're a family sheep farm, and Viscous Bits is who we call for anything technical, desktop support, our email, the website and online store, troubleshooting, and whatever else comes up. They really know their stuff. It has saved us a lot of time and we get more done. They're dependable, and I'd recommend them to any small business that needs help with its technology. We're so grateful for their support.
Stack
WordPress store on a Linux server we manage