It’s every developer’s nightmare. You finally get approval from the client to go live and launch the client’s website and then BOOM! Something happens and the whole site blows up.

I recently had this scenario happen. Thankfully, the site wasn’t live yet, but the client still expected me to fix the site, with no offer of extra payment, even though I wasn’t the one who blew up the site.

There’s no doubt about it. A site blow-up can be difficult to handle.

I ended up spending an entire unpaid day and a half trying to figure the issue out. I reinstalled the site and database several times, played with the settings and finally gave up and put it on my own server to test it out. Turns out, it was a server issue brought on by messing with the htaccess file in WordPress.

Fixing blown up sites is obviously not the best way to spend our work time, so I made sure to turn it into a learning experience for next time. So, what do you do if a site blows up on you?

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Amber Weinberg

Amber is a freelance front-end developer specializing in semantic and accessible custom WordPress themes. She works with agencies and other freelancers to bring their designs to life using custom ACF flexible layout builds - making them more performant and less buggy while allowing the client easy customization without breaking the design system.