THE REPAIR SHOP

I am often asked whether I can repair an existing website and my usual answer is to say that I can but I would have to rebuild it from scratch. Often this is a relatively easy task as I have an existing model to copy from and with the technology I use, there are not many layouts that I cannot reproduce. But of course that is like me building a new site for the client and I have to charge them accordingly.

The purpose of this page is to see if there are ways you can work with your existing web developer to repair what you already have. In fact it may not be the web developer's fault as you may have inadvertently caused the problem yourself by some content that you have changed, (assuming that the website has that functionality).

So first - how do you analyse what problems your website has?

It may be blindingly obvious that there is a problem. For example:

1. You may have a blank box where there should be an image showing
2. You may see what looks like bits of code floating about on the screen
3. You may see some sort of error message that you don't understand
4. You may realise that your website is missing some content that you once had but can no longer see

With all these items your first port of call is your existing web developer. I can analyse the web site for you using tools that I have and probably give some clues as to where to start looking but ultimately your existing web developer is going to have to fix the problem.

Problems that you may be able to fix yourself

Then there are some things that if they were fixed would make your website perform better, both in the sense of page loading times but also in the sense of ranking in search engines. Here are some common problems:

Very large images

Images are too large and in the wrong format. It is very easy to load an image to a website and forget that a 2 MB image you downloaded from your camera or phone is probably going to drastically slow down your website. You can use https://pagespeed.web.dev/ to analyse the performance of your site on mobile and desktop. If that recommends optimising some images you should consider going to https://squoosh.app/ and resizing your images and (if the framework your website is built with allows) use .webp images as the output. See below:

Broken links outgoing

If you have links on your site pointing to a web page that is no longer there then your site has a problem, albeit a small one but you need your site to be perfect in the eyes of the search engines not to mention your customers right?

You could go through every page on your site and test each link individually. This might be the best way if you know that you don't do much outgoing linking. Another way is to use a tool. See my article here on online broken link checkers and use one of these to find out if there is a problem.

Unable to use the content management system

If you can no longer use the content management system you should check what level of PHP your hosting is running. PHP is the technology that allows the interaction between your customers and your website. Without it most contact forms will not work and content management systems depend on it too. The current supported levels of PHP are available here. If you can see that you are not on a supported level then try to log into your hosting package, navigate to the control panel and find where you are able to change PHP levels. Request a change to the level of PHP. If you change it and it doesn't work you can always change it back again! Once you have changed it to a supported level test both the CMS and your contact form.

If your hosting package doesn't show support for the current supported PHP level then it might be time to consider changing your hosting!

Fact check reported problems with your website

If, like me, you often receive emails offering to fix your site then it is sometimes possible to fact check some of the statements made in the email. Often I have found the statements to be highly generic or if they are more specific then I can often prove that they are not correct which implies to me that the company emailing me haven't checked my website at all but are just targeting me with a generic email template and everyone they target will get the same email.

For instance if they make a claim that you don't have meta title and meta description set up then you can check this by looking at the source code of a web page. For example if in Safari I go to Develop>Show Page source for this Repair Shop page I will see this:

Yes it is source code but don't get too worried about that. In the first few lines of this code it is possible to verify that the meta title and meta description are set up correctly.

Other browsers work slightly differently but most browsers allow you to examine the source code so you will often be able to fact check some of the statements made about your website.

I have an audit tool called Website Auditor which does a complete job of analysing a website and finding errors on each page. It's one of the first things I run when I have built a new website and published it. There are so many things to think about when building a site that it is almost inevitable that I will have missed something but with this tool I can quickly spot what needs doing to get a site working as efficiently as possible. I am not suggesting that you want to subscribe to purchasing this tool but I have run this tool on many of my clients existing sites in order to be able to analyse any shortcomings.