It’s October, which means it’s officially acceptable to talk about horror. And after 20+ years of running c-Seven, I’ve got some stories.
A big part of what we actually do isn’t building websites from scratch. It’s inheriting them. The previous developer disappeared. The agency they hired ghosted. The cousin who “did websites” moved on to doing something else. The site needs help. We open the hood, and… well. Let’s just say some of these sites should come with a priest.
Here are some the typical hits from the crypt. If your website does any of these, I’m not saying call us, but I’m not NOT saying it.
1. “Don’t touch anything or the whole thing breaks”
You know the one. Everything is held together by duct tape, good intentions, and a very specific version of PHP from 2016. The moment you try to update WordPress, a plugin, or even look at the site funny, something breaks. Usually something important, like the contact form or the checkout. So the site just… sits. Unpatched. Unsecured. Quietly accumulating vulnerabilities like a haunted mansion collects dust.
The fix isn’t really a fix. It’s a careful rebuild of the fragile parts so the site can actually be maintained again. It costs money. It would have cost less if someone had done it properly the first time. That’s the lesson hiding in most of these stories, honestly.
2. The Elementor (or Divi) graveyard
At some point, someone discovered a page builder. They got excited. They built the homepage. Then the about page. Then ten landing pages. Each one with its own settings, custom CSS, nested widgets five layers deep, and about 400KB of bloat the user never asked for.
Page builders are fine for what they are. But when a site is 100% dependent on one, you’re locked in forever, and the site gets slow, hard to update, and nightmarish to redesign. We’ve opened sites where the “heading” on every page is actually a styled div inside a container inside a row inside a section. Google loves that. (Google does not love that.)
3. The domain is registered to someone who no longer exists
An ex-employee. A former developer. A cousin’s Hotmail address from 2011. The agency that shut down in 2019. You’d be shocked how often a business doesn’t actually own the domain their website lives on, and the day that domain expires, the whole operation goes dark. Emails too, usually.
I’ve written about this one before, but it keeps happening, so here we are again. If you don’t know for a fact that the domain is in your name, under an account you control, with a credit card that actually works, assume it isn’t, and go check today.
4. The “custom” theme that was never supposed to be custom
Someone downloaded a free or paid theme. Instead of setting up a child theme like a reasonable person, they edited the theme files directly. It looked great. It worked great. Then the theme released an update six months later, the client hit “update,” and every customization vanished in a single click. Or, even better, they never updated at all, and now the theme is three years out of date and riddled with holes.
5. No backups. No docs. No access.
This is the combo platter. The previous developer is unreachable. The hosting login is lost. There’s no staging site, no version control, no documentation, and the last real backup is from whenever the hosting company felt like running one (spoiler: they didn’t). Everything works until it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, there’s nothing to roll back to.
If this sounds like your site, the scariest part isn’t what’s broken right now. It’s what happens the first time something breaks.
The moral of the spooky story
Most of these horror stories have the same root cause: the site was built for day one, not day 500. Whoever built it wasn’t thinking about who’d maintain it, update it, or inherit it, and eventually, someone always does. That someone is often us, usually on a Tuesday afternoon, usually right before a long weekend.
The good news is that none of these situations are unfixable. Unpleasant, sometimes. More expensive than they should have been, often. But fixable. And if you recognized your own site in any of the above, the best time to deal with it is right now, calmly, in daylight. Not at 2 AM when something has already gone wrong.
Happy Halloween. Try not to let your website haunt you.
