Have you ever had a website disaster like this?

Have you ever had a website disaster like this?

Fitz2kleen is a family-owned and operated specialist cleaning service based in Coventry in the UK. Established in 2008, husband and wife team Mark and Trena Fitzmaurice have grown their business through their website fitz2kleen.co.uk to become the premier specialist cleaning service in the area.

Like many local businesses, Fitz2Kleen rely heavily on their website and Local SEO for leads and sales. However, recent technical problems with the website had a disastrous effect on their business which they are only now beginning to recover from. We talked with Trena about what went wrong and the steps they are taking to prevent this from happening again.

Fitz2Kleen

As is all too common, problems started when their web designer abandoned the project and provided no ongoing support for a smooth handover.

“Our original web designer decided he was not going to do websites anymore. So, I arranged to transfer the hosting to another web company. When we did that, everything broke.

He had put everything on auto so when WordPress was updating, there were outdated plugins causing conflicts. Transferring the site to the new hosting provider flagged up everything that was wrong with it. It was distorted, everything had gone out of alignment. It looked like a child had designed it. We weren’t showing on Google, pages were broken. It was just horrendous.

We went from being booked up six weeks in advance to having absolutely nothing and no calls, no inquiries, anything.”

Fitz2Kleen specialise in infection control and are the preferred supplier for local councils. They run the emergency response team for the fire service and are called in whenever there’s a positive case of COVID-19. They provide an essential sanitisation service in this time of global pandemic so for their website to be out of action has been devastating.

Fitz2Kleen

“I would say probably 75% of our work comes through the website. I mean, we do advertise on other business directories and what have you, but it’s very negligible what comes through from there. Our website has always been our shop window.

Our new web designer attributed the sudden drop in business to the pandemic. But if anything, we’ve been busier because of it.

We’re not a new business. We’ve been going since 2008. We know what a normal fluctuation is like when it’s quiet. This was different. This was serious.”

The summary stats page in Statcounter was the canary in the coalmine for Trena. Seeing the sharp downward trend in visits at a time when business should be booming is what first alerted her to the problems with her website.

Over the course of the past three months, Trena and her new web designer have been working on rebuilding the website. Session Replay has been an important tool in making sure visitors are finding the information they need and visits are converting to enquiries, and ultimately sales.

“With Session Replay, I can see who’s visiting, where they’re clicking, and if they’re clicking and not getting anywhere. I can go back to my web designer, and say, “Well, what are they looking for?” You know, if they’re clicking in one particular spot all the time, and it’s not taking them anywhere, have a look at it, and see what you can do, you know, what they’re trying to find.

Watching recordings also helped us identify some flows that could be improved. Visitors were having to go back to the menu to get to other pages rather than just being able to go from one page to another.

We saw from Session Replay that people were clicking on our phone number and email address, but it wasn’t linked to anything. You know, people would click in, and nothing was happening. So we were able to fix all these things. Session Replay highlighted all that to me, which, you know, it’s a godsend, really.”

Trena has added her web designer as a user on her Statcounter account so he can watch recordings and monitor traffic on an ongoing basis. Keeping an eye on stats and watching recordings of visitors will expose any website issues as they occur and enable Trena and her web designer to nip things in the bud before they have a chance to negatively impact the business.

If you haven’t yet experienced the valuable insights Session Replay can bring to your business, you can try it now for free for a week.

3 Comments

  1. That hurts! The first thing to do is to set up every single theme, plugin, etc., to manual updating. I had such experience several years ago, but hopefully that was not a big business website, just blog and I restored it very fast.
    For sure, it’s an important lesson to learn for future.

  2. That’s a great lesson to learn for all entrepreneurs on handling website disaster. Thanks for Statcounter for sharing the story.

  3. Sorry to hear, most of the online marketers have lost their online business due to various reasons, at-least you should always take regular backups of your website while taking measures to secure it. Take care and get yourself back with your online business website like it were before.

Comments are closed.

Try Statcounter free for 30 days

No credit card required. Downgrade to the free plan anytime.

Try it for FREE!