A client messaged us on a Monday: sales were down. Nothing was broken. The site loaded, the catalog worked, the checkout button clicked through.
What had happened: a credential for one of their delivery integrations had quietly expired over the weekend. The page did not crash, it just returned no shipping rates, so the final step showed a blank box, and customers assumed the store could not ship to them and left. No error log, no alert, no angry email. Just a few days of people walking away.
It cost them a weekend of orders, and it cost us an uncomfortable conversation about why this went unnoticed. Fair question. We had been watching whether the server was up. We were not watching whether a customer could actually finish buying something.
So if you own a site, these are the five things we would check today, and most of them fail silently.
One, complete a real purchase or submit a real form yourself, end to end, today. Not the homepage, the last step.
Two, find out when your integration keys and certificates expire, and write the dates somewhere a human will see them.
Three, open your own site on a phone, on mobile data, not office wifi.
Four, check where form submissions actually land. We have seen contact forms mailing to an inbox that had sat unopened for a year.
Five, confirm someone gets told when something fails. Not a dashboard someone could look at, a message that arrives.
What we do differently now: each project we run gets a check that behaves like a customer, not like a server. If the purchase path stops working, we hear about it before the client does.
Probably worth asking yourself when you last bought something from your own site.