What Could Go Wrong
Setting realistic expectations for your digital marketing journey
When you hire a company to handle your website, advertising, or SEO, things don’t always go according to plan. Not because anyone did anything wrong, just because that’s how this stuff works. We’ve been doing this long enough to see the same problems come up repeatedly. So instead of pretending everything will be perfect, here’s an honest look at what can happen and why.
Website Problems That Occur
E-Commerce Cart Issues
One of the first things we do when taking over a website is security hardening, and sometimes this breaks the shopping cart. Security hardening is critical for reducing vulnerabilities, strengthening defences, protecting it from hackers, malware and other cyber-attacks.
What often occurs is you’ll have a customer try to add something to their cart, and nothing happens. The item just doesn’t get added. This usually comes down to user sessions being cached too aggressively, or security protocols that are too strict for the cart to function properly. We’ve learned to watch this and adjust the security settings to find the right balance, but it still occurs from time to time.
Speed Optimisation Gone Wrong
We push websites hard on loading speed. Time to first byte matters for search rankings, for conversions, for everything really. A fast website, one that’s snappy and responsive, feels good for people to work with in our time poor world where we are becoming decreasingly tolerant of slow website loads.
When working with a server we didn’t set up ourselves, sometimes our optimisation creates issues such as caching that’s too aggressive or settings that conflict with existing configurations. We test thoroughly, but occasionally situations occur that affect how the site functions that we then need to address.
The WordPress Question
People sometimes ask why we use WordPress when you hear about WordPress sites getting hacked all the time. As of December 2025, WordPress powers over 43% of all websites globally, around 590 million websites. The reason you hear about WordPress hacks is simple math: they’re the number one website builder in the world by far.
We use WordPress because it’s incredibly good at what it does. When done right, WordPress sites are oppressive in their SEO and ranking capabilities. It’s open source and free. Security isn’t about which platform you choose, it’s about knowing how to set it up right and maintain it. Working with an agency that specialises in security hardening matters more than the platform itself.
Advertising Issues
The Expensive Learning Period
When we take over advertising accounts, or when we’re building new campaigns from scratch, costs go up, sometimes significantly. Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are all large language AI models that need to be trained, and you must have extensive metric and conversion tracking in place for this to occur.
Google considers an account “seasoned” after about thirty conversions, minimum. We typically see a burn of one to three thousand dollars in the first couple of months while the AI learns. This isn’t wasted money exactly, rather the cost of training the system. But it does mean your early months won’t be your best months.
Ads Don’t Stay Good Forever
Here’s something most agencies won’t tell you: most ads nowadays are not evergreen. They have a shelf life. We’ve seen campaigns start strong and then gradually lose effectiveness, usually somewhere between seven and thirteen months.
The AI can run away with the account, or it loses what we call its “edginess”—when it’s not as new, not as exciting, and Google starts to slow it down. When we see this slowdown happening, we build new campaigns to bridge the gap. But there can still be a dip in the middle where performance drops before the new campaign hits its stride.
Wrong Traffic Gets Through
You can set up all the geographic targeting you want. Exclude certain areas, define your ideal customer down to the smallest detail—but there’s still going to be some slop where it brings in wrong areas, wrong people, wrong places.
The best thing to do when this happens is alert us. We have extensive tracking on websites. We can find that user, figure out how they got in there, and put exclusions in place. We also have to contend with people from certain countries using proxy servers to fool their locations, driving up your ad costs. We try to prevent this with extensive IP blocking ranges, but we can’t catch everything.
Timing Problems
Website Timelines Slip
We might quote six to eight weeks for a website. That’s an average, not a fixed time. We’ve finished sites in four or five weeks. We’ve had others stretch to three, four, even five months.
The difference usually comes down to the client. How responsive are they? How clear in their mind do they have what they want? What really slows things down is the back and forth, being wishy-washy about what clients are looking for, or seeing something and then deciding they want something different. On the development side, we call this scope creep, where the project keeps expanding because clients keep thinking of new things they want. All of the above is okay, but it does affect the timing of product delivery.
SEO Concerns
You Might Lose Rankings
When you change your website significantly, especially if you’re moving to a completely new design, there’s a real chance you’ll lose search rankings. This goes back to 2012-2014 when Google released their Panda and Penguin updates to combat nefarious companies buying seasoned websites and selling scammy products.
Now Google takes a cautious approach. If they see your website has changed substantially, and it’s not done by an experienced technician who has a very deep understanding of how to preserve SEO (we call this a surgical SEO skill), then the website will lose ranking. They will be placed in what we call “Google’s sandbox”, where you get to play with all the other startup sites. We are extremely mindful of this and release changes in stages rather than all at once.
Months of No Progress
SEO isn’t some magical thing. It’s convincing Google that when someone searches for something, your website is the one that should come up and will give them a completed search. A completed search is when a person comes into your website, gets the answers they need, contacts you, and then stops searching.
Sometimes we do everything right and nothing happens for a month or two. Google sends users, those users don’t behave the way Google hoped, and we don’t move up. We must wait, go back to the drawing board, analyse what happened, and try again. There’s also a timing issue: Google timestamps when changes are made to a website. If it sees you making continual little changes that it thinks may only be to improve your ranking, you’ll be punished. Part of being good at SEO is knowing when “not” to do something.
Algorithm Updates Happen
Google changes their algorithms regularly. Sometimes those changes work in your favor… sometimes they don’t.
When a major update hits, we might need weeks or months to make adjustments based on that algorithm update. This does happen, and it’s not really something that “went wrong” so much as just the evolution of Google’s algorithm and the AI that we’re taking advantage of. Rankings you had yesterday might be gone tomorrow through no fault of anyone. That’s just how the game works.
The Bottom Line
We’ve seen all these problems before. We know how to handle them. But handling them doesn’t mean preventing them entirely. It means watching closely, responding quickly, and communicating honestly when things don’t go as planned. If someone promises you that nothing will ever go wrong, they are either lying or they haven’t been doing this long enough to know better.
Make an Informed Decision
We believe in transparency. Before you decide, understand if we’re the right fit for your business.