What Broke This Year and Why

Why breakage is silent

Because a website has no way of telling you something stopped working.

A form that fails to send produces no error for the business, only for the visitor, who assumes it worked and waits.

A missing tracking tag produces a zero, which looks the same as a quiet month.

Which means the default state is that failures persist until a customer complains or somebody happens to look.

The four that account for most of it

• Forms that stop sending, usually after a change to email or hosting.
• Certificates expiring, which makes browsers warn visitors away.
• Updates changing the layout, particularly on phones.
• Tracking removed during a theme or plugin change.

The first is the most expensive, since every enquiry during the failed period was lost, and the people who sent them believe they contacted you and were ignored.

Forms, and why they fail

The most common failure and the least visible.

A form sends its contents as an email, and that email can fail for reasons unconnected to the website.

A change of email provider, a new spam filter, a hosting move, a plugin update, or a mailbox that filled up.

Which means the form appears to work perfectly, the visitor sees a confirmation, and nothing arrives.

The only reliable test is submitting it yourself and confirming the email lands in the inbox rather than anywhere else.

Worth doing monthly, and worth doing immediately after any change to email, hosting or plugins.

A worked example

A business that changed its email provider in the spring.

Everything appeared to work. Staff email moved across, addresses continued receiving mail, and nothing looked wrong.

The website contact form continued sending to the old provider, which accepted the messages and delivered them to a mailbox nobody opened.

Three months later somebody phoned to ask why an enquiry had never been answered, which prompted a check.

Forty-one submissions were sitting in the old mailbox, several of which had been genuine work that had gone elsewhere.

The cost was considerable, and the check that would have caught it takes two minutes.

Certificates

The one with the most dramatic symptom.

The certificate that produces the padlock has an expiry date, typically a year or shorter.

When it lapses, browsers display a full-page warning telling visitors the site is not secure, which almost everybody obeys.

Which means the site is effectively offline, and traffic falls to near zero until it is renewed.

Most hosting now renews these automatically, and automatic renewal occasionally fails silently, so it is worth knowing the expiry date and checking it once a quarter.

They also tend to expire at inconvenient moments, since nobody is watching on a Sunday.

Updates that change things

The failure that is visible and still goes unnoticed.

A theme or plugin update can alter spacing, break a layout on phones, remove a customisation, or change how something displays.

Whoever applied the update usually checks the homepage on a desktop and concludes it is fine.

Which misses interior pages, the contact form, and the phone view, where the damage usually is.

A short checklist after any update, covering the homepage, one service page, the contact page and a phone view, catches nearly all of it in five minutes.

Things that break without anybody touching them

Worth separating, since these are not caused by a change at your end.

A third-party service that shuts down, taking whatever it provided: a map, a booking widget, a review display, a font.

An external script whose provider changed something, so the component silently stops working.

A payment or email service changing its requirements, so an integration configured years ago stops being accepted.

And an outbound link to a business that closed, which is not breakage exactly and looks like carelessness.

None of those announces itself, and all of them are found by the same monthly look rather than by any monitoring.

The counter-case

Where this level of attention is disproportionate.

A plain site of static pages with no forms, no logins and no plugins, which has very little that can break.

A site actively maintained by somebody whose job includes this, where the checks are already happening.

And a business whose enquiries all arrive by phone, where a broken form costs less, though it still costs something and still misleads whoever used it.

For an ordinary small business site with a form and a handful of plugins, the monthly check earns its ten minutes several times over.

Monitoring, and its limits

Worth knowing what automated tools do and do not cover.

Free uptime monitoring will tell you when a site stops responding entirely, which is useful and is the least common failure.

Some services check certificate expiry and warn ahead, which is worth having since that failure is total and time-based.

What no monitoring catches: a form that submits successfully and delivers nowhere, a layout broken on phones, or a phone number that stopped being a link.

Which are precisely the failures that actually happen, and every one of them requires a person to look at the site.

Monitoring is therefore a supplement to the monthly check rather than a replacement for it.

The monthly ten minutes

Concretely, since general advice to check things does not get done.

Submit your own contact form and confirm the email arrives.

Open the site on a phone, in a private window, and look at the homepage and one service page.

Tap the phone number and confirm it dials.

Glance at whether traffic is roughly normal.

And check the padlock is present.

Five things, about ten minutes, once a month, and between them they cover the failures that actually happen to small business sites.

Keeping a record

1. Note the date of every check.
2. Note anything you changed and when.
3. Test the form after any email or hosting change.
4. Know your certificate expiry date.
5. Check phone view after every update.
6. Keep it all in one place.

The second is what turns a future problem into a five-minute diagnosis, since almost every silent failure began with a change that somebody made and then forgot about.

Almost every expensive silent failure could have been caught within a month by somebody spending ten minutes looking.

The update side of this is covered in updating things without breaking them.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.