October 1, 2025

Help, my website is down!

Wordpress breaks often. A 2023 WP survey found that 52% of Wordpress professionals had experienced their site breaking due to a plugin or theme update in the past year.

Even small updates can trigger the White Screen of Death if code conflicts with other plugins or the PHP version. Major core releases sometimes introduce compatibility issues with older plugins or themes. WPBeginner estimates that after every major release, hundreds of thousands of sites experience breakage, or at least visible errors, until patched.

How often does this happen?

For small business sites, expect something to break every few months unless updates are tested in staging.

Who pays?

Fixing a broken website will cost money, but there could be more damages. The question is: who pays for these damages?

• The Website Owner / Business
  • Direct costs: lost sales, lost leads, downtime, and developer fees for urgent repairs.
  • Indirect costs: reputation damage, search ranking penalties (if downtime is long), frustrated users.
• Developers / Freelancers / Agencies managing the site
  • If they promised reliability (via a maintenance contract, SLA, or hosting/responsibility bundle), they may have to eat the cost of fixing it, or risk losing the client.
  • They may also have liability if negligence is proven (e.g., not testing updates before deploying).
• The Hosting Provider
  • Usually not directly responsible unless the breakage is tied to server configuration (e.g., a plugin requires a specific PHP version but the hosting provider is stuck on an older one).
  • However, Managed Wordpress Hosts often market ‘peace of mind’ and may step in with emergency support if plugins break.
• Plugin Author / Vendor
  • For free plugins: no one is legally obligated to pay you back. The license (GPL) explicitly says software is provided ‘as is’ with no warranty.
  • For premium plugins: the vendor might issue patches and updates, but they rarely cover your losses. At best, you can request a refund or demand faster bug fixes.

So, the site owner usually pays the most, both in terms of damages and money. Agencies/developers often absorb some of the cost to soften the blow and to preserve their client relationships. Plugin authors and hosting companies almost always walk free (even if they are guilty).

The problem

Your Wordpress website will break sooner or later and you will probably be the one who pays the price. Although WordPress hosting and themes are relatively inexpensive, the time required to repair a broken website is a cost often overlooked. When this happens, you will struggle to find budget and it will be hard to justify the additional expenses, especially when you face damages like lost leads as well. This will put tension on the relationship between you and your developer and can (in a worst case scenario) lead to litigation. Most website buyers (and sellers!) are unaware of this toxic and risky dynamic.

The solution

To prevent this, you should be able to purchase a service that guarantees a working website. After thoroughly exploring the Wordpress market I started offering this service. It wanted it to be a better version of ‘Managed Wordpress Hosting’, which rarely covers everything. I chose to use Static Site Generators (SSGs) instead of Wordpress. This technology simplified things significantly. This simplicity enabled me to take responsibility for all issues.

This was 10 years ago and I never looked back. I now run 100 websites that never break, for almost 100 clients. Difficult conversations about hidden costs are now in the past. All my clients are super happy.

Do you want a better relationship with your web developer and reduce your (financial) risk? Choose for an SSG.

()  Joost van der Schee