That time a client's landing page went down during a $2k campaign launch

I was sitting at my desk last Tuesday at 8am getting ready to flip the switch on a big Google Ads push. Ten minutes in, my phone starts blowing up - the landing page was throwing a 500 error and nobody on their IT team had updated the plugin. I had to pull the ads, call their guy, and wait 3 hours for a fix while the budget sat idle. Has anyone else had a launch derailed by something as simple as an outdated plugin?

2 comments

2 Comments

hollyramirez5d ago

Flip it around and look at it from the client's side. Their site broke because of something basic, but that's on them for not having a proper staging environment or a pre-launch checklist. You pulled the ads fast, which is good, but a 3 hour delay on a $2k spend is barely a dent in the grand scheme. It sounds like you handled it fine and the real lesson is that a launch without a rollback plan is a gamble people take way too often.

hill.david5d ago

Honestly, having a clear rollback plan saved my butt more than once.