Why websites break and how to get them fixed quickly and on budget.
Your company website is often one of the first experiences a prospective customer has with your brand.
If your team can’t easily make website updates, if pages load slowly and links don’t work, if the website looks bad on a phone or mobile device, if routine maintenance creates new problems, then your website is not doing its job.
Your customers probably won’t call to tell you something is wrong. They’ll simply leave and find another company that can meet their needs.
A broken website does not help your company grow.
The frustrating part is most website problems aren’t dramatic. They’re small issues that build up over time: an outdated theme, an expired SSL certificate, a plugin update nobody tested, a page that was never checked on a phone, or login credentials that nobody can find.
These problems are easily ignored, but often cripple your website and greatly impact the experience of your prospective customers as they explore buying from your company.
In this blog, I will walk through 10 of the most common reasons websites break and lose their effectiveness with website visitors. I’ll review why these issues should not be ignored and explain how the team at Intuitive Websites fixes each issue based on more than 22 years of experience fixing websites across industries.
1. You Can’t Easily Edit Your Website
What it looks like: Your team does not have the ability to easily edit the website. This leads to an outdated website, issues with contact forms, broken website pages and more. You must have access to your website and the ability to make regular updates. Another symptom is an agency that charges way too much money and takes too much time for even simple website edits.
Why this happens: It may be that your team does not have a current login, the Content Management System’s (CMS) may be too difficult to use or your agency never trained your team to edit the website.
Many websites are also built using systems owned or preferred by the original design and development company. When that relationship changes, the business is left with a website that is difficult to update. This is extremely common with small businesses whose websites were built years ago by a freelancer or agency that’s no longer reachable, with credentials that were never handed off cleanly.
How we fix it: Our website technical audit gives you the complete picture of what it will take to edit your website. We will recommend a new site if needed, or provide a plan of action to fix the current site.
We take full recovery of hosting, the website domain and the CMS access. You are set up with your own properly documented, secure ownership of every part of the website and the login is never held hostage and you don’t have to worry about a lost password again. We also train your team to make updates and provide support when you need us.
Your internal marketing team should be able to edit your company website. Websites need regular updates, and having that capability inside your organization saves time, money and frustration.
2. Website Updates Crash the Website
What it looks like: Someone makes a routine update and suddenly a page shows a blank white screen, the layout becomes jumbled, or an error message appears referencing a plugin or theme. Any changes to the website cause the site to crash or break.
Why it happens: Content management systems, like WordPress, rely on plugins and themes that are updated independently. An update to one piece can conflict with another, especially if the site hasn’t been maintained in a while and multiple updates pile up at once. The site can also crash if the PHP code is old and outdated. Also, many hosting companies will only host sites with updated and secure PHP.
How we fix it: We identify the conflicting update, roll back or reconfigure it safely, and then put a maintenance plan in place for testing updates in a staging environment before the updates go live, so a routine update never takes your company website down again.
3. The Security Certificate Has Expired
What it looks like: Visitors see a “Not Secure” warning or a full-page browser error before they can even reach the site. People are much less likely to visit your website when they see these errors.
Why this happens: SSL certificates need periodic renewal and if the renewal is manual or tied to a contact who’s no longer with the company, it’s easy for it to quietly lapse.
How we fix it: We install and configure auto-renewing SSL certificates so this simply does not happen. We double-check the domain’s underlying configuration at the same time, since certificate issues often reveal other neglected settings.
4. The Website Doesn’t Work on Phones, Tablets and all Popular Browsers
What it looks like: Text overlaps, buttons are too small to tap, images spill off the screen, or menus don’t open correctly on a mobile device. This can happen even though everything looks fine on a desktop and your browser of choice.
Why it happens: Many older websites were built before mobile traffic became the majority of web visits, or were updated over the years by different people without anyone checking how those changes rendered on smaller screens. New sites are not always tested across various browsers like Safari and Firefox.
How we fix it: We rebuild the site’s layout using modern, fully responsive design practices and test across real devices, screen sizes and browsers. We do this so the website experience is consistent on whatever platform or device used by your target market.
5. The Website Is Painfully Slow
What it looks like: Website pages take several seconds (or longer) to load and visitors bail on the website before they ever see your content. Slow performance can also hurt your search visibility and the overall user experience.
Why it happens: Website speed problems usually come from a combination of oversized, unoptimized images, bloated code from page-builder code, too many third-party scripts and hosting that isn’t suited to the site’s size or traffic. It could also be that the website is simply old and needs updating.
How we fix it: We optimize images and code, trim unnecessary scripts, and tune the hosting environment specifically for speed. We test load times and target load-time benchmarks that both visitors and Google’s search ranking systems reward.
6. The Website Was Hacked or Compromised
What it looks like: Visitors are redirected to unfamiliar websites, spam content suddenly appears on pages, browsers or search engines flag the site as unsafe, or your hosting company takes the website offline.
Why it happens: Outdated CMS software, weak passwords, old themes and unpatched plugins are the most common doors spammers use to get into your websites. This tends to impact websites that have not been actively maintained.
How we fix it: We clean the website of malicious code, patch the vulnerabilities causing the issue and add ongoing security monitoring so a repeat incident is caught immediately, rather than discovered by a website visitor.
In some cases, we restore the website from a clean back-up, although this can be a challenge because the malicious code cannot always be detected, and in some cases, will regenerate itself after it has been removed.
If this is the case, and there is no clean back-up, we will recreate the website and launch a clean version starting with the most important pages first and building from there. This avoids excessive downtime for the website.
7. The Original Site Was Built Poorly
What it looks like: Many of the issues discussed in this blog happen because a website was not built properly to start. A website that’s been “fixed” repeatedly but keeps having new problems, or one that simply can’t do what the business needs it to do fit in this category.
Why it happens: Websites built quickly, cheaply, or without experienced web design and development support often work at launch, but weren’t built on a foundation that holds up as the business grows or website standards change.
How we fix it: Sometimes another patch isn’t the right answer.
We will tell you honestly if a website rebuild on a more solid foundation will actually save you money and headaches over continuing to patch an unstable website.
8. The Website Goes Down Entirely
What it looks like: Visitors get a blank screen, a “500 Internal Server Error,” a timeout, or a generic “this site can’t be reached” message.
Why it happens: Hosting issues are the most common cause. A shared server running out of resources, an expired hosting plan, a misconfigured server update, or a spike in traffic the hosting plan wasn’t built to handle are the usual culprits. Sometimes it’s as simple as a hosting invoice that was never paid.
How we fix it: We start with a full server and hosting audit to identify exactly where the failure is occurring. From there, we typically move clients onto reliable, properly-sized hosting with uptime monitoring in place, so if something does go wrong, we know about it before a customer or website visitor does.
9. DNS Is Misconfigured
What it looks like: The website works for some people but not others, email stops arriving, or the site suddenly points to the wrong place after a domain or hosting change.
Why it happens: DNS records are easy to get wrong and easy to forget about. This is especially true after switching hosting providers, migrating email, or letting a domain registration lapse.
How we fix it: We review and correct DNS records end-to-end (A records, MX records, CNAMEs) and document them clearly, so future changes don’t risk breaking the website or email again.
10. Broken Links and Blank Pages
What it looks like: Clicking a menu item, button, or old blog link leads to a “404 Page Not Found” error instead of the expected page. Links go to the wrong web page or don’t work.
Why it happens: Pages get renamed, moved, orphaned or deleted over time. This is especially common after a redesign when redirects weren’t properly put in place to send visitors and search engines to the new location.
How we fix it: We crawl the entire website to find every broken link, then repair or properly redirect each one. This also protects the SEO value you’ve already built, since broken links quietly hurt your search rankings too. We can also help rethink the sitemap and navigation so people can more intuitively find the information they need.
Legal Issues Can Lead to Website Issues
Not every website problem is technical.
Depending on where your company operates and who you serve, your website may also need to address accessibility, privacy, cookie consent, email subscription requirements and other regulations.
That can include ADA accessibility considerations, California privacy requirements, GDPR if you do business in Europe, and additional requirements if you operate in Canada.
There are also basic questions businesses sometimes overlook.
Are your website images copyrighted and protected?
Are your privacy and cookie practices properly addressed?
Are your email subscription processes set up correctly?
We are not attorneys, and we don’t provide legal advice. But as a website partner, we can help identify areas that may need attention and work with your legal team when necessary to implement the appropriate website changes.
Technically, if you don’t have these issues covered, your website is broken.
More Benefits from Fixing a Broken Website
Having a great website brings many more benefits. Now that your website is working, you can now leverage it as a strong marketing tool to help grow your business.
A properly functioning website can:
- Create a better user experience that reflects what it is like to work with your company.
- Give search engines and AI-powered tools clearer access to your content.
- Support tools such as AI chatbots and other interactive website experiences.
- Strengthen your SEO efforts by providing a technically sound foundation for content and optimization.
- Give your company a platform for publishing thought leadership.
- Help prospective customers move through the sales funnel.
- Turn engaged website visitors into leads for your sales team.
- Strengthen your reputation with customers and others in your industry.
The technical health of your website and its marketing effectiveness are closely connected. It’s difficult to get more value from SEO, content, AI or lead-generation campaigns when the website underneath all of them doesn’t work properly.
The Bottom Line
Nearly every website problem falls into one of the categories above. The good news is these issues are not expensive or time-consuming to correct.
The hardest part is often knowing exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it.
That’s what we have done at Intuitive Websites for over 22 years.
We will run a diagnosis of your website, tell you plainly what we find, and lay out exactly what it takes to fix the problems. If the existing site can be fixed, we’ll tell you. If it makes more sense to rebuild it, we’ll tell you that too.
No confusion, no pressure, only a clear path to a website that works.
Is your website showing any of these signs reviewed in this blog?
Get a free website diagnosis from Intuitive Websites President and Founder Thomas Young to understand what’s wrong, what needs to be fixed and what you should do next.
