Broken website: fix it, or rebuild it?

Broken comes in two kinds. The sudden kind, a white screen after an update or a page that just stopped working, and the slow kind, where things have been quietly breaking for a year and nobody could fix them. The first needs an hour. The second needs a decision.

The sudden kind: the first hour

If the site is down or showing an error, in this order:

1. Check your email. WordPress sends a message when a plugin or theme causes a fatal error, with a recovery link that lets you into the admin with the broken thing switched off. This has existed since 2019 and most people have never noticed it.
2. Find what changed. Nearly every sudden break follows an update, a new plugin, or an expired card at the host. Your host’s control panel shows recent activity, and WordPress shows the last updates under Site Health.
3. Undo it. Roll back the plugin, switch to a default theme for a moment, or restore last night’s backup. If you do not have last night’s backup, that is the first thing to fix once the site is up.
4. Then find the cause, not just the trigger. A plugin update breaking the site usually means the plugin, the theme and the PHP version disagree with each other. That disagreement will be back with the next update.

If the site is up but a part is broken, a form, a gallery, the menu on phones, the same logic applies: what changed, undo it, then look for why.

The slow kind: the decision

The other broken site works, mostly. The form stopped sending in March. The slider on the homepage shows an error on phones. Two plugins cannot be updated because they will “break things”. The developer who built it does not answer. Every fix costs a call and a bill, so things stay broken.

Here the question is not how to fix the next thing. It is whether to keep paying to hold a failing foundation together.

Signs it is time to rebuild rather than repair:

• Updates are frightening. If you cannot update plugins or PHP without risking the site, you are already living with the security cost of not doing it.
• Nobody can work on it. Custom code from someone who left, a theme with no author, a plugin abandoned years ago.
• The fixes are getting closer together. One a year is maintenance. One a month is a foundation failing.
• The site is on a platform you have outgrown, and the breakages are the platform saying so.

Signs it is worth repairing:

• The platform is current and supported, and the breakages come from one bad plugin or one old theme. Replace that one thing.
• The content and the design are still right. Rebuilding would recreate what you have.
• The last two years were quiet and this is the first real problem.

What a repair looks like when done properly

A proper repair is not the one-hour fix. It is the fix, then a staging copy, then updating everything to current, then replacing what cannot be updated, then a backup you have tested restoring. After that, updates stop being frightening. That is a day or two of work on most business sites and it is what our Care plans are built around.

What a rebuild looks like when the site is broken

Faster than people expect, because the content already exists and the decisions have mostly been made by pain. The one thing to do carefully is the redirects, so the search rankings the old site earned carry over.

If you are deciding, run the site through the scanner. An old PHP version, an old WordPress version and missing headers all showing together usually means the foundation, not the last update, is the problem.