WEBSITE PROBLEMS | HOUSTON SEO AND AI SEARCH | DIAGNOSIS FIRST, FREE
Website Problems? Not Showing Up on Google? No Leads? Here Is Why, and the Fastest Way to Find Out
Every week a Houston business owner calls with one of seven problems. The site stopped ranking after a redesign. A new site built with a template or an AI tool never ranked at all. Visitors come but nobody calls. The site is slow, or hacked, or the Google Business Profile got suspended. Or the AI engines name a competitor and never you. Each one has a known cause and a free way to confirm it. Start with the free website analysis if you are not sure which one you have.
Galleria 713-703-3030 | Kingwood 281-852-8253
Seven problems, seven causes
Pick the one that sounds like yours
Why diagnosis comes first
A wrong fix makes a drop worse
Most owners find out the website is broken when the phone gets quiet, months after it happened. By then the designer has moved on and nobody remembers which pages used to bring in the calls. So we never start with a fix. We start with the date the traffic turned, what changed that month, and which pages took the hit. That is the same first step our Houston SEO team takes on every recovery, and the free tools on this page run it for you.
If the answer is a single setting, we say so. If the answer is a redesign done right, here is how we do one without losing rankings. If the answer is that the site is fine and the business needs something else, we say that too. The Houston SEO company page explains who we are; this page is for the owner who needs an answer today.
Get the diagnosis
Request your free website analysis
Tell us the site and what it should be doing. Search traffic, competitors, rankings, AI mentions, speed and conversion, emailed in plain English. Most arrive within minutes; a person reviews it before the call.
What recovery looks like
Weeks, not years, when the cause is structural
Down for everyone or just you?
Is the website down? How to check a website outage in five minutes
When a user says your website is not working, the first question is whether the site is down for everyone or only for that person. The answer tells you where the issue lives.
- Try it on a phone off Wi-Fi. If the site loads on cellular data but not at the office, the problem is the office network or DNS cache, not the website.
- Use an outside checker. A website availability tool tests the site from several locations. If every location fails, it is a real outage. Status sites such as Downdetector are useful for big platforms like Google or Microsoft, but they rarely track a small business website.
- Read the error. A browser error page carries a clue. “Server not found” points to DNS. A 500 error points to the server or a plugin. A security warning points to an expired SSL certificate. A 503 often means server overload.
- Check your email. Hosting companies and domain registrars send a notification before a domain or SSL certificate expires. Those emails often went to someone who left the company.
If it is down for everyone, call your host. If you host with us, call 713-703-3030 and a person on our in-house team answers.
The usual causes
Why websites go down: server, DNS, SSL and the other common outage causes
Most website outages come from a short list of causes.
- Server problems. A crashed server, a full disk or a host that throttles your site when traffic spikes. A good host does not shut you off because you got busy; some budget hosts do exactly that.
- DNS issues. The DNS records that point your domain name to the server’s IP address were changed, deleted or never moved when you switched hosts. The website is fine; nobody can find it.
- Expired domain or SSL certificate. Browsers block a site with an expired SSL certificate, and an expired domain stops resolving at all.
- A bad update. A WordPress plugin or theme update breaks the site with an error. This is one of the most common causes we see.
- Hacks and attacks. Malware, a defaced home page or a flood of traffic that knocks the server over.
Each cause has a different fix, which is why guessing wastes hours. A site that is slow, hacked or unstable is usually a hosting problem first. Our full service web hosting with security page explains what a host should be doing to prevent most of them.
Know before your customers do
Website monitoring and downtime alerts: how to know about an outage first
Most owners learn about downtime from a customer, hours after it started. Website monitoring fixes that. An uptime monitor checks your site every few minutes and sends an alert by email or text the moment it stops responding.
Monitoring costs little next to a lost day of calls. The check interval matters: a five minute check means a short outage can come and go before anyone hears about it, but it will catch anything long enough to cost you customers. Keep a simple record of each incident, what caused it and how long it lasted. A pattern of short outages at the same hour usually points to a server or backup job, not bad luck.
Large companies publish a status page so customers can check service availability themselves. A small business does not need one, but it does need someone watching. On our servers, our own team watches performance and availability so the response starts before the phone rings. If downtime is costing you, read why everyone needs a backup plan for their website.
Up but not working
When the website is up but still not working: the problems an outage checker misses
A site can pass every availability test and still fail the business. The page loads, but the contact form sends email nowhere. The checkout throws an error at the payment step. The phone number is a tap target that dials the wrong line. Google has stopped indexing the pages after a setting changed.
These are the website problems that do the most damage, because nothing looks broken. The impact shows up as fewer calls and fewer sales, not an error page. The only way to catch them is to test the actions a customer takes: fill in the form, place a test order, tap the phone number, and check Search Console for indexing and performance changes.
That is the job of the free website analysis on this page. We check the site from the outside the way a customer and Google see it, then tell you in plain English what is wrong. If it turns out to be a structural SEO problem, our SEO repair team handles the fix.
Questions
Website problems FAQ
Usually one of four things: the pages are blocked or not indexed, the title tags and headings do not say what the business does, there is nothing linking the pages to each other or to the rest of the web, or the site is on a platform that limits all three. The free website analysis tells you which.
Line up the date of the drop against what changed. Most sudden drops follow a redesign, a platform move or a hosting change that broke the URLs or the titles. A slower slide usually lines up with a Google update. The Traffic Drop Analyzer finds the date and the cause.
Either the visitors are the wrong visitors, because the pages rank for terms that do not buy, or the page gives them no clear next step: no phone number above the fold, a long form, no proof. The homepage check and the conversion review in the full audit cover both.
Signs are strange pages in Google results under your name, warnings in Chrome, spam email from your domain, or a sudden traffic spike to pages you did not write. Hosting clients can call support now; anyone else can request the free analysis and we will tell you what we see.
The AI engines cite sites that are structured clearly, say what they do without hedging, and answer the whole question on one page. If your site cannot be crawled or your pages are thin and vague, the engines cannot quote you. AI search optimization starts with the same technical fixes as SEO.
Most suspensions trace to a category, address or name problem, or to edits that tripped Google’s filters. We handle reinstatements with the documentation Google asks for, as part of local SEO.
Yes, and most repairs are exactly that. We audit first, document what we find, and give you the plan before anything in production is touched.
Check whether it is down for everyone with an outside checker or a phone on cellular data. If it is, the usual causes are a server issue, DNS changes, an expired domain or SSL certificate, or a bad plugin update. Call your host with the exact error message.
Load it on a phone off Wi-Fi and run it through a website availability checker that tests from several locations. If it loads elsewhere but not for you, the problem is your network or DNS cache.
A 500 error is a server-side failure, often caused by a plugin or code error. A 503 means the server is temporarily unavailable, often from server overload or maintenance. Both need your host or developer.
Set up website monitoring that checks the site every few minutes and sends an email or text alert when it stops responding. Our hosting team watches availability on our own servers.
Find out what is wrong this week, not this quarter.
713-703-3030, or request the free website analysis and we will send the diagnosis with the plan.
Galleria 713-703-3030 | Kingwood 281-852-8253 | info@verticalweb.com