Website outages: How to avoid disaster happening to your business

The Kitsch Hen bake and deliver iced biscuits hand-stamped with personalised messages. Pixel Point Design were asked to build them a professional e-commerce website that in turn led to a notable increase in sales and, in the owner’s words, “massively changed the business”.

With an average of 10 orders a day received and processed through the website, biscuits are baked and dispatched on a daily basis. The website is built in WordPress, utilising a bespoke theme (a collection of files that work together to produce the graphical interface and functionality of the website) designed by Pixel Point Design.

One morning Caroline rose early and checked the website for orders. However, she was puzzled to see nothing there. Some data was present but the theme had disappeared. The website looked unfinished and, to say the least, odd. Puzzlement turned to panic.

Not only would orders be lost without the website functioning, but, looking as it did, would be extremely damaging to the reputation of the business. Certainly Caroline knew that any new customers visiting the site would be immediately put off and would not order. Even worse, Caroline was due to go on holiday the next day and feared that unless she could resolve the issue immediately, it could stay like that for the duration of her holiday (and possibly ruin her holiday for worrying about it).

Caroline contacted the website hosting company who refused to accept responsibility for this outage. They told her that it was a problem with something other than the hosting service and likely to be an issue with the WordPress theme. Caroline knew this not to be the case since all theme updates had been applied and, in particular, because Pixel Point Design is responsible for the updates and maintenance of the system.

So at around 7.30am Caroline emailed Pixel Point Design with an SOS message, and within 30 minutes Dean, our Creative Director, responded. Realising the issue lay with the hosting service, as Caroline had correctly assumed, Dean very swiftly suggested migrating the entire website onto a new hosting service, to which Caroline readily agreed.

Caroline was amazed that the website was up and running on the new platform by the same afternoon, particularly as this was not part of Pixel Point Design’s contract with The Kitsch Hen.

Pixel Point Design were delighted to go the extra mile for their client and, at the same time as effecting the migration, the website was updated to the latest version of WordPress with all plugins and the theme updated too, to ensure that once the switch was made, the site was as stable as it could be.