That time our landing page went down during a big campaign launch...

I was sitting in my home office in Portland last Tuesday when I noticed our Facebook ad traffic was tanking. Checked the site and all I got was a blank white screen... turns out a plugin update borked everything exactly when we had $3,000 worth of ads running. I had to manually disable the plugin through FTP because I couldn't even get into the backend dashboard. Took about 45 minutes to fix and we probably lost a good chunk of leads that afternoon. Anyone else ever had a plugin update ruin a campaign launch?

3 comments

3 Comments

diana_kim6614d ago

Ngl that's a classic case of the "one plugin to rule them all" turning into the "one plugin to ruin them all." I had a similar thing happen last year with a WooCommerce update that nuked the checkout page right before Black Friday. Lost about $1,200 in sales over two hours before I realized it was a cache issue not even the plugin itself. Worst part was I spent the whole time blaming the wrong plugin and restarting the server.

xena_bailey1814d ago

blaming the wrong plugin" is such a mood. I've definitely spent way too long pointing fingers at the wrong code before. It's almost always something dumb like cache or a conflict you overlooked.

phoenix_bailey14d ago

The real kicker nobody talks about is how these things always happen during a campaign launch and never during a random Tuesday afternoon when you've got time to spare. It's like the universe has a built in detector for when you're spending the most money on ads. I've started keeping a staging copy of the site on a subdomain specifically for testing plugin updates before they go live. Takes an extra 20 minutes but saves me from having to frantically dig through FTP while watching ad spend burn. Also worth checking if your host offers automatic backups you can restore from the dashboard. Saved my bacon twice now.