Cute as a Button Dog Grooming
She clicked update, the way WordPress tells you to. The site went blank.
What was wrong
The site loaded its background colour and then stopped. Blank page where the content should be.
It happened straight after a WordPress update, but the update wasn’t a mistake. WordPress asks you to update, and updating is the right thing to do.
The problem was underneath. The site was built in 2020 and the layers below WordPress hadn’t moved since. Old theme, old PHP. Bringing one part of that up to date while the rest stayed in 2020 was enough to take the whole thing down. Nothing in the dashboard warns you about that.
There was a second thing, and it’s the one that actually mattered. Tara had never been shown the hosting control panel. She didn’t know the PHP version was something that could be changed, or that it needed changing. The only update button she’d ever been shown was the one inside WordPress. That’s the one she pressed.
Tara had reopened in April. She spent the week while the website was down taking bookings over the phone and through Facebook.
What I did
I left the live site alone to start with. I rebuilt a copy of it on a private server of my own, so I could break it as many times as I needed to without anyone seeing.
Then I found the fault instead of guessing at it. Updating WordPress on the copy brought the blank page straight back. Swapping the theme out made it stop. That put it on the theme, which meant fixing the thing that was actually broken rather than everything that looked old.
The current version of the theme dealt with most of it. One bug was left: the site crashed when a post was missing its featured image. I wrote a small patch for that and kept the patch on file so it can be reapplied if the theme updates again.
Before anything went near the live site I took a full backup. Then I brought the server up to a current version of PHP and deployed only the parts that had changed. Her images, her content and her settings stayed exactly where they were.
What changed
The site’s back, and the trap it fell into is gone. WordPress, the theme and PHP are all current and in step with each other, so the next update doesn’t have five years of drift to fall through.
Routine security updates now install themselves. The bigger yearly upgrades are the ones that need someone watching, and Tara knows to ask me rather than find out afterwards.
She also knows what she’s got now. Where the site lives, what controls it, and which parts move independently of each other. None of that is complicated. It just has to be told to you once.