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Case study · Annelie Coetzee Consulting

Annelie Coetzee Consulting: a broken WordPress site rebuilt in under four hours

When Annelie Coetzee Consulting's WordPress site stopped working and updates only made it worse, XP Labs used AI to rebuild the theme as a custom Elementor build on the existing dashboard, matching the original look, in under four hours.

The Annelie Coetzee Consulting homepage: a Food Safety Management hero describing PRP, HACCP, BRCGS and ISO 22000 / FSSC 22000 training, under a navigation bar with the SAATCA and Exemplar Global logos.
From a broken site to a rebuilt, working theme
< 4 hrs
Dashboard, content and look, kept intact
Same
Elementor editing back in the client's hands
Restored

The problem

Annelie Coetzee Consulting has spent two decades training, auditing and consulting food handling businesses on PRP, HACCP, BRCGS, ISO 22000 and FSSC 22000. Their website is where prospective delegates find courses and get in touch.

That website had quietly stalled. It ran on WordPress with a commercial theme, Elementor and a layer of add-on elements, and over time it had become badly outdated. Then it stopped working properly: the template was no longer functional and Elementor would not load at all, so nobody could edit the site.

We tried the usual fixes first, a series of plugin and theme updates. Each one made things worse. The stack had become a tangle of dependencies that no amount of updating would untangle.

What we did

Rather than keep patching, we stepped around the problem with AI.

We connected the WordPress installation directly to an AI development platform and rebuilt the theme from the ground up as a custom build designed for Elementor. Crucially, we did it on the existing dashboard:

  • the client’s content, pages, users and settings stayed where they were
  • the new theme was built as a faithful lookalike of the original, so the site their clients knew did not suddenly change
  • the broken commercial theme and its tangle of add-ons were taken out of the critical path
  • Elementor was working again, so the team could edit their own pages

The complete theme redevelopment took under four hours.

Why it worked

The slow part of a rescue like this is usually reverse-engineering a theme: every template, layout and style that has to be recreated before the old one can be removed. AI did that heavy lifting quickly, while people made the calls on what to keep, what to drop and what had to look exactly as before. Working on the existing installation, rather than migrating to a new one, removed the risk of losing content along the way.

The result

Annelie Coetzee Consulting went from a site nobody could edit to a stable, working website with a custom theme that they own, in a single afternoon, with no visible disruption for the people who use it.

With the foundation fixed, the next phase is under way: content optimisation and SEO, so the site starts working as hard for the business as its training does.

If your website has got stuck, or every update breaks something, see how we approach AI web development.