Best Berries

The situation

Best Berries is a small, family-run frozen berry retailer in Wynberg, Cape Town, selling frozen fruit, smoothie packs and health boosts for delivery across the city. Like many small businesses, they had relied on one developer to look after their website, hosting and email for years - and like many small businesses, none of those accounts were in their own name.

By the time they came to us, three problems had stacked up at once.

The website had been hacked. Someone had been quietly injecting spam into the site for months. Google Search Console showed close to 200 pages indexed under the Best Berries domain that had nothing to do with berries - online casino reviews, sports betting, free-spins offers, crypto gambling and worse - most of them added between March and May 2026. Every one of those pages was telling Google that bestberries.co.za was a spam site.

Nobody could get the keys. The website, hosting and email all sat with the previous developer and an older hosting account, and the previous developer was no longer in a position to help with a handover. Getting even basic login details was slow, partial, and in some cases impossible.

The email was out of reach. The business mailboxes lived with the old host, and despite every effort, the existing mail could not be recovered. For a business that takes orders and talks to suppliers by email every day, that is the business going quiet.

What we did

A compromised site cannot be trusted, so restoring it was never an option. We treated it as a rescue: save everything worth saving, then rebuild properly.

Recovered what we could. We scraped the old site for everything usable - products, descriptions, categories, pricing and images - before it was taken down, so the business did not have to start its catalogue from nothing.

Rebuilt the shop from the ground up. A brand-new online shop on clean, properly managed hosting, with none of the old code carried over - organised around how customers actually shop for frozen fruit, smoothie packs and combos.

Filled the gaps with the owners. Where the old site and accounts could not tell us something - delivery areas, product details, pricing, how orders actually work day to day - we worked it out alongside the client, one piece at a time, until the new shop reflected how the business really runs.

Set up new business email. The old mailboxes could not be recovered, so we set up new ones on reliable infrastructure, restructured the addresses around how the business works, and helped the owners piece back the contacts and information they needed to keep trading.

Cleaned up what the attack left behind in Google. Rebuilding the site was only half the job - Google still remembered the spam. We told Google that all of those injected casino and betting pages are permanently gone, cleared out more than 230 spam categories and tags that had come across with the old content, and pointed the old product links at their new pages so customers searching for a product still land on it.

Put every account in the client's name. This is the part that matters most. The domain, the hosting and the email accounts are now registered to Best Berries itself, with the logins in the owners' hands. We hold delegated access to do our work, but the business owns its own foundations. If they ever choose to work with someone else, nothing is locked away and nothing has to be begged for.

The principle behind all of it: losing access to your own website and email is not a trust problem, it is a structural one. When the accounts live in the client's name from day one, neither the business nor the developer can ever be held hostage by the other - or by circumstances outside anyone's control.

What changed

• A clean, secure shop. Rebuilt from scratch on proper hosting, with nothing of the compromised site carried over.
• Spam gone from Google. Close to 200 injected spam pages now tell Google they are permanently removed, old product links lead to the right products, and Search Console shows no security issues or penalties against the domain.
• Selling again. In the last 28 days alone, the new shop processed more than R13,000 in online orders, with Google search as the biggest source of customers.
• Email that belongs to them. New business mailboxes on stable infrastructure, in the client's own name.
• Full control. The domain, hosting and email accounts are owned by Best Berries, documented, and accessible to the owners at any time. They can never be locked out of their own business again.

What it cost

This was scoped as a Site Rebuild engagement with content recovery, email setup and ongoing care. The pricing sits within the ranges published on our Services page.

If you are in a similar situation - a website that has been hacked, accounts you cannot get into, or email and hosting registered in someone else's name - book a call and we will assess what it takes to get you back in control.

Who this fits

Any small business that has lost access to its website, its email, or the accounts underneath them - or that suspects it might be in that position and does not want to find out the hard way. Same approach every time: recover what we can, rebuild it properly, and put everything in your name.