Prime Research
Rebuilt their store. Then got it back when their host locked them out.
- Role
- Developer, then ongoing technical partner
- Duration
- Nov 2025 to present
- Stack
- WordPress · WooCommerce · PHP · MySQL
- Design
- Blennex
The situation
Prime Research is one of Australia’s leading scientific research peptide suppliers. It is a competitive, trust-sensitive niche where how a website feels has a direct effect on whether someone buys. Their entire revenue runs through the store.
The rebuild
The old site did not look the part. People in this category decide whether a supplier is legitimate before they decide anything else, and it was not clean or professional enough to survive that first look. The hero was a bare image with no text on it. Someone landing there from search had nothing to tell them what the company sold or why to trust it. Navigation made finding a specific compound harder than it needed to be, there were no trust signals anywhere on the page, and technical SEO was weak on top of that.
Blennex handled design and I handled all development. We rebuilt from the ground up. The new site is clean and professional in the way a medical category needs to be, the navigation is built around how customers actually look for products, and it has the trust sections the old site was missing. It scores 100 for SEO in Lighthouse.
In the nine months since launch, monthly revenue has run roughly 4.7× the ten months before it.
A note on that number. The business was scaling its marketing hard over the same period, and it would be dishonest to claim the rebuild caused all of that growth. What I can claim: the platform absorbed nearly five times the transaction volume without a single unplanned outage.
Then the host locked them out
On 27 May 2026, GoDaddy suspended the hosting account. Their position was that a research peptide supplier was a medical site, and that this breached their policy. The store went completely offline.
Support was unreachable, and when reached, would not release a backup of the site. There was no provider-side recovery path. The store was down and the client had no access to their own data.
What I did
- 01Established that the suspension applied at the web-server layer only. File and shell access to the account was still reachable.
- 02Pulled the full site over SSH: WordPress filesystem and a complete MySQL dump.
- 03Rebuilt the environment locally under XAMPP and verified the restore end to end before touching anything live: database integrity, the full product catalogue, and the complete order history.
- 04Provisioned new hosting at Porkbun, deployed the verified backup, and repointed DNS.
The DNS repoint was the easy part. The new host had a one-click option and it propagated immediately. Total time offline was about two days, and most of that went on working out whether a recovery path existed and then verifying the restore before trusting it.
Result: site restored on independent infrastructure. Zero data loss.
What I’d do differently. The recovery worked because file access happened to still be reachable. That was fortune, not design. The first thing I set up afterwards was automated off-server backups, so that recovery never again depends on a failing provider’s cooperation.
Since then
Product search
Search was broken, and it was costing sales. Any query redirected to an archive page listing every product, whatever had been typed. A customer looking for one specific compound got the entire catalogue. I rebuilt it as a typeahead. Suggestions appear as you type, each with the product image and price, and pressing Enter goes straight to the product instead of a listing page.
Ongoing maintenance
Monitoring, updates, off-server backups, and issue resolution.
Renewed for a fourth consecutive quarter.
“Your maintenance services are incredible. You work very efficiently and you optimized the website to be as clean and responsive as possible. We like speed and we like the premium service you provide. Having you on our team is extremely important to us.”