The Update Button of Doom

It all started out well enough. A solopreneur was going to make a couple of quick changes on their website before they moved on to their planned tasks for the day. They logged into their WordPress dashboard and noticed that several plugins were out of date. “I might as well take care of that while I’m here” they thought. They clicked the Update button and that is when their whole day went south. The Update did not go well and now their site was down and they weren’t sure why or what to do next. They had been so busy juggling a million competing demands in their business that they never got around to setting up a backup system for their website, so there was no going back – the only solution was to figure out how to repair their site and FAST.

The Googling started. Lots of articles offered lots of ideas about what had gone wrong and how to fix it, so they started trying things without any assurance that whatever they tried would actually make things better, not worse. Hours later – no love, site still down, no idea why. The solopreneur felt the weight of passing time – revenue-generating tasks that were going undone, potential clients who were turned off by their broken website, and that unique frustration of ‘I did this to myself – I should not have clicked that Update button” . Hours later, they were finally able to get their site back up but they’ll never get the lost time back. What was supposed to be a couple of quick changes had turned into a time sink that torpedoed their entire day.

Take-aways:

1. Your website is an essential part of your marketing and when it goes down, it hurts your brand and your business. Have a disaster-management plan for quick recovery – backups should be treated as mission-critical, not an ‘I’ll get to it later”.

2. Google will generate a bajillion responses to your search for solutions. 80% of them are junk. Unless you have a fair amount of WordPress expertise, you won’t be able to tell the 80% from the 20%. Randomly trying solutions you find on Google can actually make the problem worse, not better.

3. The person who fixes your printer or helps you set up your new computer is probably not the right resource to solve this problem. Technology is a vast universe of skills and though you are tempted to call your ‘tech friend’ to help you, WordPress troubleshooting is a specialized skill – the odds are high that they will do exactly what you are doing – Google and guess….

4. Finally. Time is money. There are times for DIY and times to outsource to an expert. If I can get your site back up in under an hour and you can go back to finishing your important presentation, making calls to potential prospects, or finishing a time-sensitive project – isn’t the smart money on outsourcing?

Thrashing around with a downed website wastes your valuable time. Consider adding me to your contacts as your on-call WordPress expert. I’ll be here when you need me.