There’s a moment we see in almost every store we inherit from another agency or developer. Someone on the team needs a change, something small, seemingly straightforward. Maybe it’s updating a product description, changing shipping text, or adjusting a promotion banner.
And instead of just doing it, they hesitate. They check with someone else first. They ask if it’s safe. They wonder what might break. They wait for a “good time” to make the change, preferably when traffic is low and someone technical is available to watch for problems.
We’re talking about changing text on a website. And the team is nervous about it.
This isn’t paranoia. It’s pattern recognition. These teams have learned—often painfully—that small changes can break things in unexpected ways. They’ve seen a simple text update somehow break checkout. They’ve watched a banner change crash mobile layouts. They’ve experienced enough “but I only changed one thing” disasters that they’ve become afraid to touch anything.
This is what happens when a store accumulates too many quick fixes. Eventually, nobody knows how anything really works anymore. The codebase becomes a mystery. Even small changes feel risky. And the store goes from being a tool the business controls to being something the business is afraid of.
Let’s talk about how this happens and what it actually costs.
How quick fixes start (and why they make sense at the time)
Quick fixes don’t start as bad decisions. They start as practical responses to immediate needs.
You need a feature for a product launch next week. Building it properly would take two weeks. Someone finds a workaround—maybe a plugin, maybe some custom code, maybe a clever hack that makes it work. You ship on time. The launch happens. Everyone moves on.
Or you’re approaching Black Friday and the checkout flow needs a small adjustment. Your developer is busy with something else. Someone figures out a CSS tweak that kind of works. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough and it’s fast. You ship it. Sales happen. Nobody revisits it.
Or a customer-facing bug appears on a Friday afternoon. Your developer writes a patch that fixes the symptom without fully understanding the cause. The bug disappears. The weekend is saved. The patch stays in place because touching it again might bring the bug back.
None of these individual decisions are crazy. When you’re running a business, sometimes you genuinely need to move fast. Sometimes “good enough today” beats “perfect in two weeks.” Sometimes fixing the immediate problem is the right call even if the solution isn’t elegant.
The issue isn’t any single quick fix. It’s the accumulation. It’s what happens when quick fixes become the default approach instead of the occasional exception.
The technical debt nobody tracks
Every quick fix creates a small amount of technical debt. That’s not inherently bad—debt is a tool. You can borrow against the future when it makes sense, as long as you pay it back.
The problem is that most stores never pay it back. The quick fix ships, the immediate crisis passes, and everyone forgets about it. Then the next crisis arrives, and another quick fix gets added. Then another. Then another.
Over time, the codebase becomes a layered archaeology of quick fixes. Plugins that override other plugins. CSS that overrides CSS that overrides the theme defaults. JavaScript snippets that work around issues instead of fixing them. Workarounds for workarounds. Patches on patches.
And almost none of it is documented. The person who wrote it moved on or forgot why it was needed. The problem it originally solved might not even exist anymore, but nobody knows if it’s safe to remove the fix.
This is how you end up with a store where:
Nobody can confidently answer “what will this change affect?” Simple updates take three times longer than they should. Testing becomes guesswork because the interactions are too complex to predict. New features are harder to add because you’re never sure what they’ll break. Site performance gradually degrades because inefficient fixes pile up.
The scary part is this happens gradually. There’s no single moment where someone decides “let’s build this wrong.” It’s a thousand small decisions that individually made sense but collectively created a mess.
The fear that kills velocity
Once a store has accumulated enough quick fixes, something shifts in how the team operates. They become cautious. Conservative. Afraid to move too fast.
This shows up in predictable ways:
Changes that should take an hour take a day because everyone wants to triple-check everything first. Simple updates get scheduled for low-traffic periods “just in case.” The team develops elaborate testing rituals for minor changes. Deployment becomes an event that requires multiple people and careful timing instead of something that happens routinely.
The marketing team wants to test new messaging but worries about breaking something. The product team has ideas for improving the catalog but doesn’t want to risk it before the holiday season. The operations team knows the checkout flow could be better but is afraid of touching it during busy periods.
So changes get delayed. Tests don’t happen. Improvements pile up on a wishlist that never gets addressed. And the store stays static not because the team lacks ideas but because they’ve learned that executing those ideas carries risk they can’t predict or control.
This is the hidden cost that never shows up in any budget. It’s not what you’re spending on fixes. It’s the opportunity cost of all the improvements you’re not making because you’re too afraid to deploy.
The plugin trap that seems like a solution
When teams get nervous about custom code, they often turn to plugins or apps as a safer alternative. This makes intuitive sense—plugins are pre-built, tested by other users, maintained by someone else. Just install, configure, and move on.
And for the right use cases, plugins are great. They’re perfect for standard functionality that lots of stores need. Why build your own analytics when Google Analytics exists? Why write custom email marketing when proven tools are available?
The problem comes when plugins become the default answer for everything. When the response to any new requirement is “let’s find an app for that” instead of “should we build this properly?”
This creates its own kind of quick-fix debt:
You end up with plugins that overlap in functionality, each doing 40% of what you need. You’re paying for capabilities you’re not using because the plugin bundles features you don’t need with the one feature you do. Plugins conflict with each other in ways that are hard to diagnose. Updates to one plugin break another, and now you’re stuck managing compatibility instead of running your business.
We’ve seen stores running 30+ plugins where half of them could be replaced by cleaner custom solutions. Each plugin adds page weight. Each one is another potential security vulnerability. Each one is another dependency to manage.
And here’s the thing that bothers us most: plugins often mask the real problem instead of solving it. You need a plugin to speed up your site because your site is slow—but maybe it’s slow because you have too many poorly chosen plugins in the first place. You need a plugin to improve search because search doesn’t work well—but maybe search would work fine if your product data was clean and properly structured.
Quick fixes on top of quick fixes, all the way down.
The developer who’s afraid to touch anything
Eventually, this catches up with whoever’s responsible for the technical side. Maybe it’s an in-house developer. Maybe it’s an agency. Maybe it’s a freelancer who inherited the mess.
And you can see it in how they work. They’re slow. They’re hesitant. They want to thoroughly test everything before deployment. They push back on requests that seem simple.
From the business side, this feels like the developer being difficult or overly cautious. Why does changing a button color require three hours of testing? Why can’t we just add this one small feature before the weekend?
But from the developer’s perspective, they’ve learned that nothing in this codebase is simple. They’ve been burned before. They changed something that seemed isolated and watched it break three unrelated features. They updated a plugin and discovered it was holding together a critical workflow through some undocumented dependency.
So they slow down. They test obsessively. They say no to changes they’re not confident about. They ask for more time than seems reasonable because they’ve learned that in this codebase, everything takes longer than it should.
This creates a vicious cycle. The business gets frustrated with slow development velocity. Pressure builds to move faster. The developer either caves and ships risky changes (creating more problems) or digs in and becomes the bottleneck everyone resents.
Neither outcome is good. And the root cause isn’t that the developer is incompetent or that the business is unreasonable. It’s that the store has accumulated so much technical debt that change itself has become risky.
The migration fantasy (again)
This is often when teams start thinking about migration. The current codebase is a mess, changes are scary, velocity is slow—clearly the answer is starting fresh on a new platform with a clean slate.
We talked about this in another piece, but it’s worth repeating here: migration doesn’t fix this problem unless you also fix the behaviors that created it.
If your pattern is to ship quick fixes under pressure, you’ll do the same thing on the new platform. Within six months, you’ll start accumulating the same kind of debt. Within a year, you’ll be right back where you started, just on different infrastructure.
The platform isn’t making you ship quick fixes. Business pressure is. Lack of discipline is. Not prioritizing time to do things properly is. Those problems don’t go away when you migrate—you just spend six months and a lot of money moving them to a new environment.
Sometimes migration is the right answer. But not because it magically solves technical debt. Only because it forces you to rebuild cleanly and gives you an opportunity to establish better practices from day one.
If you’re not also fixing your processes and discipline, you’re wasting time and money on migration.
What it looks like to dig out
Getting out from under quick-fix debt isn’t fast and it isn’t glamorous. There’s no magic bullet. It’s just steady work over time, and it requires making different choices about how you handle new requests.
The first step is acknowledging the problem exists. Not vaguely—specifically. Document what you know is fragile. List the plugins that are redundant or barely used. Identify the workarounds that have been in place so long nobody remembers why.
This is uncomfortable because it makes the mess visible. Most teams would rather pretend everything’s fine and just work around the issues. But you can’t fix what you won’t acknowledge.
The second step is stopping the bleeding. This means changing how you respond to new requests. When someone asks for a quick fix, you start asking harder questions: Do we really need this? Can we solve the underlying problem properly instead? What’s the right way to build this, and why aren’t we doing that?
Sometimes the answer still is “we need the quick fix because timing matters more than perfection right now.” Fine. But make it a conscious decision, document it as technical debt, and schedule time to come back and fix it properly.
The goal isn’t to never take shortcuts. It’s to make shortcuts the exception instead of the default, and to actually pay back the debt you create.
The third step is dedicating time to cleanup. This is the part most businesses resist because it doesn’t feel productive. You’re not shipping new features. You’re not directly increasing revenue. You’re just making things less broken.
But this is exactly like maintaining a building or servicing a vehicle. You can defer it for a while, but eventually the lack of maintenance creates bigger problems that force you to stop everything and fix them anyway—just at much higher cost.
Better to schedule regular cleanup. Maybe it’s one day per sprint. Maybe it’s one week per quarter. Whatever works for your rhythm, but it needs to be consistent and protected time that doesn’t get sacrificed when other priorities emerge.
What good looks like in practice
Stores that have their technical house in order operate differently. The differences aren’t always obvious from the outside, but they’re dramatic from the inside.
Changes happen faster because the team is confident about what they’re modifying. Simple updates don’t require elaborate testing because the codebase is predictable. New features can be added without fear of unexpected interactions because the architecture is clean.
Developers can answer questions like “what will this affect?” with confidence. The team can deploy multiple times per week instead of scheduling deployments as rare, risky events. Marketing can test new ideas without requiring engineering approval for every change.
This doesn’t mean nothing ever breaks. Problems still happen. But they’re isolated, understandable, and fixable quickly because the system isn’t a fragile house of cards.
The business difference is huge. When your team isn’t afraid to deploy, you can move faster. You can test more ideas. You can respond to market changes without weeks of lead time. You can actually optimize and improve instead of just maintaining the status quo.
We’ve seen stores double their deployment frequency just by cleaning up technical debt. Same team, same platform, just a cleaner codebase that people can work with confidently.
That velocity compounds. More tests mean more learning. More learning means better decisions. Better decisions mean better outcomes. All because the team isn’t paralyzed by fear of breaking things.
The discipline that prevents the problem
The stores that avoid quick-fix accumulation don’t have better platforms or bigger budgets. They have better discipline about how they approach changes.
When a request comes in, they ask: “What’s the right way to build this?” Not the fastest way or the cheapest way, but the right way—the approach that fits cleanly into the existing architecture, that’s maintainable, that doesn’t create new dependencies or workarounds.
Sometimes the right way takes longer. Sometimes it costs more upfront. But it saves time and money long-term by not creating debt that has to be paid back later.
They also have boundaries. Not everything that could be built should be built. Sometimes the right answer is “no” or “not yet” or “let’s solve this differently.” Having the discipline to say no to bad requests is just as important as having the skill to build good solutions.
They document as they go. Not elaborate documentation that takes hours—just enough context that someone else (or their future self) can understand why decisions were made and how things work. This prevents the “I have no idea why this is here or if it’s safe to remove” problem that plagues stores with too many old fixes.
They maintain a backlog of technical debt and actually work on it. It’s not just a list where things go to die. It’s a real queue that gets regular attention, where items get prioritized and addressed before they become emergencies.
This takes discipline because it requires doing less-visible work and sometimes saying no to visible new features. That’s a hard sell when everyone wants to ship more. But it’s what prevents the slow accumulation of debt that eventually makes shipping anything feel dangerous.
Why agencies don’t always tell you this
Here’s an uncomfortable truth about our industry: quick fixes are profitable for agencies that bill hourly.
A quick fix takes less time upfront than doing it right. The client is happy because they got what they needed fast. The agency makes decent margin because the work was simple. And when that fix creates problems later? Well, that’s more billable work to fix those problems.
There’s no incentive to say “this will create technical debt that’ll cause issues in six months.” The client doesn’t want to hear that—they want the feature now. And the agency knows that in six months, either they’ll get paid to fix the new problems or the client will move to a different agency and it won’t be their problem anymore.
We’re not saying every agency operates this way. But enough do that it’s worth being aware of the dynamic.
At BrandCrock, we’ve made a deliberate choice to have these uncomfortable conversations upfront. When someone asks for a quick fix that’ll create debt, we explain the tradeoffs clearly. Sometimes they still choose the quick fix because timing matters. That’s fine—it’s their business and sometimes speed really is more important.
But we want them making that choice with full information, not discovering the consequences six months later when it’s too late to make a different decision.
This sometimes costs us work in the short term. Clients who just want the quick fix find agencies who’ll give it to them without the lecture. But the clients who appreciate the honesty tend to stick around, and those long-term relationships are better for everyone.
What this means for your store
If your team has become afraid to deploy, that’s not normal and it’s not okay. Fear of change is a symptom of accumulated technical debt that’s grown large enough to affect how your business operates.
The good news is it’s fixable. Not instantly, but steadily, if you commit to different practices and dedicate time to cleanup.
The bad news is it won’t fix itself. Left alone, technical debt grows. The codebase gets messier. Changes get riskier. Velocity slows further. Eventually you hit a crisis point where you’re forced to either do a major cleanup or migrate to start fresh.
Better to address it now while you have the luxury of doing it methodically instead of waiting until it becomes an emergency.
Start by taking inventory. What parts of your store are people afraid to touch? What changes consistently take longer than they should? Where are the workarounds and quick fixes? You probably already know the answers—you just need to write them down.
Then stop adding to the problem. When new requests come in, take the time to ask if there’s a right way to build it instead of just a fast way. Not every time—sometimes fast still matters—but more often than you currently do.
Then start scheduling cleanup time. Even a few hours per week makes a difference over months. Pick the most fragile or painful areas first and work through them systematically.
The result isn’t perfection—no codebase is perfect. But it’s a store that your team can work on confidently instead of fearfully. Where changes don’t carry mystery risks. Where deploying is routine instead of risky.
That confidence changes everything.
If you’re living in quick-fix debt
If this describes your store—if your team has become cautious about changes because too many things have broken unexpectedly—you have options.
You can keep living with it, working around the fragile parts, deploying rarely and carefully. Lots of stores operate this way for years. It’s frustrating and slow, but it’s survivable.
You can dedicate time to cleaning it up yourself if you have technical capability in-house. This takes discipline and time, but it’s absolutely doable if you’re willing to prioritize it.
Or you can bring in help specifically to address the technical debt. Not to build new features, but to clean up the existing mess, document what’s actually there, and establish better patterns going forward.
That’s work we do at BrandCrock. Not the glamorous project work that looks good in portfolios, but the unglamorous cleanup work that lets stores move confidently again. Taking the time to understand the archaeology of fixes, documenting what can be removed safely, refactoring what needs to stay, and establishing patterns that prevent the problem from recurring.
It’s not fast and it’s not cheap. But for stores where technical debt has become a real velocity problem, it’s an investment that pays back quickly in restored confidence and faster execution.
If that sounds like something you need, reach out. We’ll give you an honest assessment of what’s fixable and what it would take. And if cleanup isn’t actually what you need—if your problems are elsewhere—we’ll tell you that too.
Because the goal isn’t selling you a service. It’s helping you get to a place where your store works for you instead of against you. Where changes feel safe instead of scary. Where your team can move fast because the foundation is solid.
That’s what stores should feel like. And it’s achievable, even if right now it doesn’t seem like it.
brandcrock_admin
Jan 27, 2026
