Confessions of a Marketing Agency #01: We Broke Our Own Website (Twice)

We learned a really important lesson last week. Sometimes the most important lessons are the ones we teach ourselves by making mistakes.

Or — you could argue we didn’t make a mistake at all. We just got feedback. Either way, we think you should benefit from the pain we went through, so here’s exactly what happened.

Three weeks ago we made a small technical change to our own website. It broke almost every page on the site except the homepage. Nobody outside our team noticed. But we did — and we fixed it, and we wrote down exactly why it happened so we’d never do it again.

Then last week, while tidying up something unrelated, we found a second problem hiding behind the first one: a redirect rule — a leftover instruction telling the website “if anyone asks for this page, send them somewhere else instead” — that had been quietly sending visitors and Google away from ten of our own blog posts. Including, ironically, the posts about brand consistency and getting the basics right.

We didn’t notice for weeks. Google didn’t complain loudly. Nothing looked broken if you just glanced at the site. That’s exactly the problem — this kind of thing doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly costs you visibility, one search result at a time, until someone goes looking properly.

So we went looking properly. Here’s what we found:

• A setting change that looked like a sensible tidy-up, and instead took the whole site offline in every way except the homepage.
• A safeguard we’d set up months earlier — an automatic tool for telling search engines “we’ve published something new” — that had silently stopped working, unnoticed, for weeks.
• Ten blog posts, technically live, technically written well, invisible to anyone who actually clicked through to read them.

None of these were dramatic. None of them would show up if you just looked at the site. That’s what makes them dangerous — and it’s exactly the kind of thing sitting quietly on a lot of small business websites right now, not just ours.

We’re not writing this to say “look how clever we are for fixing it.” We’re writing it because if it happened to us — and we build websites for a living — it’s happening on other people’s sites too, without anyone knowing to look.

If you’d like us to have a look at yours, get in touch.