Our website broke after a hosting update

You get an email from your hosting company about scheduled maintenance, ignore it like every other one, and the next morning your website shows a blank white page or an error message. Or the homepage looks fine, but the contact form doesn’t send, the shop won’t take payments, or customers can’t log in.

You didn’t change anything, and that’s usually the clue.

Why this happens

Your website runs on software provided by your hosting company, most often a programming language called PHP and a database. Like phone operating systems, these get new versions every year, and old versions eventually stop receiving security fixes. When that happens, hosting companies move their customers onto a newer version, often with a few weeks’ notice buried in an email.

Websites built for an older version don’t always work on a newer one. Some of the commands they rely on have been removed or now behave differently. The older the site and the longer since anyone updated it, the more likely something breaks, and the problems often hide in the less visited parts: checkout, booking forms, admin pages, automatic emails.

What to do today

1. Ask your host if they can switch you back. Many hosting control panels let you choose the PHP version yourself, and many hosts will roll it back for a while if you ask. This often brings the site back within minutes.
2. Treat that as a breather. You’ve bought weeks, maybe months. The old version has stopped getting security fixes, which is why the host moved you in the first place, so staying on it leaves your site exposed.
3. Check the parts that make money. Place a test order, submit the contact form, log in as a customer. Breakages are often in places you don’t look every day.

The proper fix

The real fix is updating the website so it runs on a current, supported version. For a site that’s had regular care, that’s a small job. For one that hasn’t been touched in years, it’s a project worth doing carefully:

• make a full copy of the site and work on the copy
• update the code and any plugins or add-ons to versions that support the newer PHP
• test the important journeys on the copy before switching over
• keep the old version ready to switch back to, in case something was missed

Done this way, your customers never see a broken site. Done in a hurry on the live site, they often find the problems before you do.

Stopping it happening again

Hosting companies will keep upgrading, and each upgrade is harder on a site that’s fallen several versions behind. A small amount of regular upkeep, a check every few months and an update once a year, costs far less than an emergency. If you’re not sure whether your site is behind, it probably is, and the signs your working system has quietly become a liability cover what else to look for.

If your website broke after an update and you don't have anyone to call, reach out to us. We'll get it working again, tell you plainly what it would take to bring it up to date, and do the upgrade if you'd like us to.