Insights
Insights
Technical SEO insights from real work: what we measured, what we changed, and what happened. Published when there is something worth reading.
Why the second payment attempt fails in silence
On a WordPress store selling subscriptions, customers who came back to try paying again were turned away with a message that explained nothing. No failed order, no error in the logs, and 65,526 stored carts for 261 orders ever placed.
The forgotten llms.txt still describing your old website
When we rebuilt this website, its llms.txt still described the old one: services we no longer offer and pages that no longer exist. It had been written by a plugin that was no longer installed.
Structured data that invents facts about your users
A community site told search engines that 3,939 member profiles shared the same profession, because the code filled in a job title whenever one was missing. Structured data is read as fact, so a guess becomes a false statement.
Too many cookies can break your site with a 400 error
One cookie per item looks harmless. On a community platform it reached 83 cookies for a single visitor, sent with every image and script, and heading for the limit where servers answer 400 Bad Request.
Your website may be blocking AI assistants, and nobody told you
A single setting at your CDN, and sometimes another one at your host, can stop ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity from reading your website. Nothing on the site shows it. Here is how to find out and what to decide.
Your sitemap can return a 404 with perfect XML inside
A WordPress sitemap can look flawless in the browser and still answer HTTP 404. Google does not use a sitemap that answers 404. Here is how to check yours in one minute, and how to fix it.