Upgrade scope
How to scope an upgrade for a site built with AI tools
"Please improve it overall" is a request that cannot be estimated. An upgrade needs a scope before it can have a cost or a timeline. Sort what you are facing into the four areas below. One sentence per area is enough.
Design and usability
The screens exist, but people get lost or do not trust them.
- Can a visitor tell what the service does within three seconds of the first screen?
- Do text, buttons, and inputs hold up on a phone?
- Are colors, fonts, and spacing consistent from page to page?
- Is the path to sign-up, payment, or contact visible everywhere?
Features and integrations
Things that do not exist yet, or only half work.
- Money features: payments, subscriptions, refunds
- People features: login, permissions, admin screens
- Connection features: booking, notifications, email, external APIs
- Data features: search, filters, sorting, export
Bugs, performance, stability
Things that work sometimes, run slowly, or are occasionally wrong.
- Bugs with reproduction steps (which screen, which action)
- Problems that appear only on certain devices or browsers
- Screens that slow down as data grows
- Flows where doing something twice creates duplicates
Launch and operations readiness
It is built, but not ready to publish or run.
- Domain, HTTPS, automated deploys
- Backups, error alerts, logs
- Secret management and permission cleanup
- Terms, privacy policy, support channel
How to set priorities
- Anything that leaks money or exposes data comes first: payment errors, another user’s data showing, leaked keys.
- Places where users drop off come second. Fix the breaks in sign-up, payment, and contact flows.
- Making things prettier comes third, except the first screen, which affects trust and can move up.
- Do not request more than three things at once. When three are done, pick the next three.
What to include in an upgrade request
- The site URL (if public) and which tool it was built with
- The one thing to fix first, and how it should behave when done
- The blast radius: live users, payments, external integrations
- Your preferred timeline, budget range, and who decides the scope
- Source-code access is agreed later. You do not need to hand over full repository access up front.
The narrower the scope, the more accurate the estimate and the sooner the first result. Start with one area, and one item inside it.