What $1,800 a Year Was Actually Buying

A property management company wanted a website refresh — new photos, a few added pages. They also couldn't figure out why nobody seemed to find them online.

Once I got inside the site, the refresh became the least of their problems.

The leasing manager had been paying $150 a month for website hosting and maintenance. That's $1,800 a year. For several years running. She didn't have login access to the company's own site. Nobody knew who owned the domain. There was no way to check Google traffic, because nobody had ever set that up.

She finally pushed for an admin login. When I got in, here's what I found:

A WordPress site with 70 unpublished draft pages, most of them from 2020. More than 70 contact forms. Fifty-two site backup files, piled up and locked so they couldn't even be downloaded or deleted.

And buried in the WordPress settings, a single checkbox that tells Google to stay away from the site. It had been checked the whole time. Nobody had ever turned it off.

What That Checkbox Means

WordPress has a setting called "Discourage search engines." It's meant for sites still being built, not ready to go live yet. Once the site launches, that box is supposed to be unchecked.

If it stays checked, Google takes the hint. It backs off. The site effectively disappears from search results.

That was the reason nobody could find them online. Not the photos. Not the page count. One overlooked checkbox, left alone for years.

What Happened Next

Identifying the problems was step one. Getting them fixed was step two.

The site needed a new host, a rebuilt design, updated photos, proper SEO setup, and a lot of cleanup. I have trusted partners I bring in for this kind of work, and that's exactly what happened here. If a client doesn't already have a web person they rely on, I can help get fixes done.

The Result

Once the real problems were addressed, the site climbed to the top three on Google for its main search terms. The leasing manager reported they were "covered up with incoming tenants" and described the business as "busy busy."

The Takeaway

Nobody knew what they didn't know. They were paying for years of "hosting and maintenance" with no access, no reporting, and no way to know their site was telling Google to go away.

This kind of problem doesn't announce itself. Business owners assume that if the site is up and they're paying someone, things must be fine. Often they're not.

The damage here wasn't complicated. But it was invisible — until someone looked.

Client details have been changed to protect confidentiality.