Websites rarely break with a bang. More often something small stops working, nobody notices, and the business quietly loses calls for weeks. The owner finds out when a customer says, “I tried to reach you through your website.”
Here are the problems we run into most often on small business sites, why they happen, and how to catch each one before it costs you work.
The contact form stops sending
This is the most expensive problem because it’s invisible. The form still looks fine and visitors still fill it in, but the messages never arrive. Common causes:
- Messages going to an old email address nobody checks anymore.
- Form emails landing in spam because the domain’s email settings (called SPF and DKIM) aren’t set up.
- A plugin or form service update that changed settings, or a free plan that hit its monthly limit.
How to catch it: send yourself a test message through your own form once a month, from a phone, and make sure it arrives in your inbox, not spam.
The domain or security certificate expires
Domains renew every year, often on a card that has since expired, or under an email address that belonged to whoever set it up. When a domain lapses, the site and often the email stop working at once. Security certificates (the padlock in the address bar) also renew, and when one fails, browsers show visitors a scary warning page.
How to catch it: know where your domain is registered, make sure the account is in your name, turn on auto-renew and check the card on file. Put the renewal date in your calendar.
The details are out of date
Old hours, a phone number you no longer use, services you’ve stopped offering, prices from three years ago, a copyright year that says 2019. None of it breaks the site, but each one makes people trust it a little less, and old hours or phone numbers send customers to the wrong place.
How to catch it: read your own site once a quarter as if you were a customer. Check that it matches your Google Business Profile.
Links and pages break
Links to pages you’ve renamed or removed, social profiles you’ve closed, menus or PDFs that moved. Visitors who hit a dead end usually leave, and lots of broken links look neglected.
How to catch it: click through every menu item and button on a phone. Free link-checker tools can scan the whole site for you.
The site gets slow
Sites usually slow down over time: big photos uploaded straight from a phone, extra plugins, chat widgets and tracking scripts added one at a time. A slow site loses visitors, especially on mobile data, and Google takes page speed into account.
How to catch it: run your home page through Google PageSpeed Insights every few months and compare the scores. Resize photos before uploading them.
Updates pile up
If your site runs on a system like WordPress, the core software, theme and plugins all need regular updates. Skipped updates are one of the most common ways small sites get hacked. Updating everything at once after a long gap can also break things, which is why people put it off.
How to catch it: update little and often, and only after a backup.
There’s no backup
Many small sites have never been backed up, or the only backup lives on the same server as the site. If the site is hacked, the host has a problem, or someone deletes the wrong thing, there’s nothing to restore.
How to catch it: make sure backups run automatically, are stored somewhere other than the site’s own server, and that you know how to restore one.
The site goes down and nobody knows
Hosting problems happen. If your site is down on a Saturday morning, you might not find out until Monday. Free uptime monitors can check every few minutes and email you when the site stops responding.
A 15-minute monthly checklist
- Send a test message through your contact form, from a phone.
- Tap your phone number on the site and make sure it dials the right number.
- Check that your hours, services and prices are current.
- Click every menu link and main button.
- Check the padlock in the address bar shows no warning.
- Confirm the last backup ran, and that updates are done.
- Glance at your visitors and leads to spot a sudden drop.
A sudden drop in leads is often the first sign. If calls and form messages fall off with no obvious reason, check the form and the phone link first. It’s usually one of those.
Or hand it off
If you’d rather not do this yourself, that’s what our website care plan is for. For $49/mo we check your site every 15 minutes, watch your security certificate and domain renewal, scan for security issues and broken links every week, run updates and backups, make up to an hour of your small changes each month, and send you a plain-English report. It works for sites we didn’t build, too. Care Plus ($99/mo) doubles the edit time and adds a quarterly speed and search tune-up.
Want to know where your site stands right now? The free website checkup takes about a minute. For a deeper look at speed, search and lead capture, the website and SEO audit ($150) gives you a recorded walkthrough and a list of fixes in order of impact.