A site built with AI tooling usually looks finished. That is the problem. The pages render, the styling holds together, and the parts that were never wired up properly fail quietly, sometimes for months, with nothing logged and nobody told.
What it usually looks like
- A contact or booking form that submits, shows a success message, and sends nothing
- Checkout or payment wired halfway, so some orders never reach you and nobody chases them
- Placeholder text still sitting in a footer, a policy page or an image description
- Errors in the browser console on load, and calls out to services that were never set up
- No error handling anywhere, so a failure looks exactly like a success from the outside
- Nothing logged, so when somebody finally reports it there is no way to tell how long it has been going on
What actually causes it
- Code written to look correct rather than to run against your real data
- Integrations stubbed out early in the build and never finished, with the stub left in place and forgotten
- Mail handed to the server default instead of authenticated SMTP, so the message is generated and then dropped on the way out
- Success messages hard-coded into the page, so the front end reports success whatever happened behind it
- Validation done in the browser only, which catches honest typos and nothing else
- No staging copy, so nothing was tested anywhere except live
What I do
Every route that takes money or takes a message gets submitted for real and followed the whole way. Form to inbox, checkout to gateway to order record, enquiry to wherever it is supposed to land. Server logs and mail logs sit alongside the gateway dashboard, matched on timestamp, so a silent failure has somewhere to show itself.
Then the dull part, which is error handling and logging on anything that talks to another system, so the next failure announces itself instead of waiting to be discovered by a customer.
None of this is an argument that AI wrote it so it must be rubbish. Plenty of what comes out is fine. The failures land in the same few places every time, and on a site that takes money those are the places that cost you.
What it costs
Diagnosis is a fixed £150. You get a written list of what is broken, what is quietly failing, and what each one takes to put right. That report is yours either way, including if you take it somewhere else. Repair is quoted separately once the list exists, and if the honest answer is a rebuild rather than a repair, that gets quoted separately too. More on how it works.
Would rather talk than type? Leave your number and a good time to ring and I will call you.