We Just Need a Website - Why Isn’t It Working?

Most Clients under-care for IT websites, apps, and the glue between them. The cost isn’t abstract. When the foundations are wrong, you don’t just slow down—you stall. One whole channel of sales, visibility, and opportunity goes dark. Then comes regret… and somehow the budget is expected to stay exactly the same. That’s the vicious circle.

I’m not here to win a tool debate. I’m here to point out how confident shortcuts turn into silent outages: search can’t trust your pages, campaigns can’t ship, carts don’t convert. Even the sharpest CMO can’t market their way out of a site that search engines don’t understand and teams can’t operate.

Edtech

Product is the business, yet the entire site sits on a fully custom build (on php) controlled by one developer. Every change is a ticket; marketing waits. Launch velocity dies, the growth channel stalls. The fix isn’t a hack—it’s moving to an architecture and CMS/LMS your team can actually run weekly. Keeping the original budget keeps the original bottleneck. Owner doesn't know what is CMS? He just decided to build what he sees, a website. Didn't calculate what it will take to create new pages, forms, how he will integrate with marketing, launch newsletters and list goes on. Just website he needed and now asking to upgrade with SEO. Deny to accept the reality and we also deny to serve, because we know with 100% certainty that this website is not flying anywhere.

D2C cookware

Traffic is under 100 visits a month, but the plan is “new theme = organic.” There are no intent-driven category pages, thin product copy, no structured data, and weak internal links. A theme swap can’t manufacture demand capture or trust. With a theme-size budget, the organic channel stays off. Why? Theme swap, as there expectation within this 100 visit is that people are coming but not purchasing and hence it must be something UI. Have you checked your own competency before making this assumption into a fact and betting on it? Typical conversion to sales is 1% or less. Website is barely said "Hello World" and they expect audience to start clapping.

Manufacturing

Google’s own tools (Rich Results Test / URL Inspection) detect the homepage as an Article, not a standard WebPage. Buyers don’t get a path to products or contact, and search can’t map intent. We rebuilt the front door—clear nav, product/industry pages, proof, obvious CTAs—and leads followed. Without funding the rebuild, that channel would have remained off. Client says: "but we just launched it". Sorry but there is no way out but do it again and do it properly. Digitup doesn't have a magic wand and we understand how painful it is.

Luxury skincare (multi-lingual)

Several language clones on WordPress with broken canonicals and hreflang. Google can’t tell which page is real, so crawling and indexation waste cycles, and rankings stall right now. This isn’t a copy edit; it’s paying back technical debt: one canonical per page, correct locale pairs (including x-default), localized metadata, clean URL patterns, separate Search Console properties, and active monitoring. Until you do that, your international organic channels are off.

Different stories, same loop:

1. Underestimate the care IT needs.

2. Make overconfident shortcuts.

3. Stall a channel.

4. Acknowledge the mistake—then insist the budget can’t change.

5. Repeat.

Proposals don’t fix this. Proposals are words. What fixes it is honest diagnosis and a budget that matches the outcome you say you want.

If you want to switch the channel back on:

• Accept the truth and logic instead of your emotions about the current state (indexation, speed, analytics, information architecture, content ops).

• Decide what growth looks like in the next 6–12 months (markets, pages that must rank and convert, release rhythm).

• Fund the changes that actually remove the blockers (technical debt and operating model changes are not free).

• If you hire specialists, let them do the job.

If you under-care for IT and under-budget the fix, you’re not just “paying a growth tax”—you’re flipping your growth channel to OFF and calling it strategy.

Digitup help teams choose and run web/app stacks that match their ambitions—without getting trapped by technical debt or tool debates. If you want a blunt, practical audit and a plan you can actually execute, let’s talk.