Your website works. For you.

By Leonel Lordeus · Lordeus Pro · 5 min read

An owner I talked to checked his website every morning with his coffee. It loaded every time, looked great, so as far as he knew the site was fine. Then a customer mentioned, almost in passing, that the page had been blank for weeks. Not slow. Blank. It had been live for exactly one person - him - and dead for everyone he was trying to reach.

This one unsettles people more than most, because there was no warning and no error. The site didn't go down in any way he could see. It just quietly stopped working for strangers, and he was the one person on earth who would never notice.

Why the owner is always the last to know

You don't visit your own website like a customer does. You type it the same way every time, probably the exact same way you did when it was first built. Your browser remembers it and fills it in. You're usually on the office network, where the computer may be holding on to an old, cached answer for where the site lives. You've trained yourself, without meaning to, to walk the one path that still works.

A new customer does none of that. They type it fresh, from their phone, on a different network, maybe with or without the "www" in front. And if only your path is wired up correctly, they fall straight into the gap you can't see.

The usual shapes this takes

It's almost always something small in the plumbing, not the website itself. A few that come up again and again:

• "www" works but the bare name doesn't, or the reverse. www.yourshop.com loads and yourshop.com shows nothing, because only one of the two was ever pointed at the site. Half your customers type one, half type the other.
• It loads on your office wifi only. The office network is quietly holding an old address for the site. Walk outside, switch to cellular, and it's gone. You rarely check from outside, so you rarely see it.
• A "coming soon" page that never left. The placeholder from when the site was built is still what new visitors get, while your browser keeps showing you the finished version it cached long ago.
• A redirect that expired. The little rule that sends one address to another lapsed or was never renewed, and now that path dead-ends while the other still happens to work.

None of these are dramatic. All of them mean a real customer typed your name, got a blank page, and quietly decided you were closed.

The question underneath it

Every one of these lives in your domain settings - the records that tell the internet where "your website" actually points. Which raises the question most owners can't answer on the spot: who controls those records? If it's a web guy you lost touch with, or a company that built the site in 2019, then fixing which address points where isn't something you can do, and finding out why it broke isn't either.

That's the part worth sitting with. A blank page is a bad afternoon. Not being able to reach the settings that fix it is the actual exposure, and it's the same exposure whether the site is broken today or not.

How to check in five minutes, like a stranger

The whole trick is to stop checking it the way you always do. So:

1. Pull out your phone and turn off wifi. On cellular, type your website address in fresh. Don't tap the autocomplete - type it.
2. Try it both ways. With "www" in front, and then without. Both should land on the same working site.
3. Open a private or incognito window on your computer and do the same. That ignores everything your browser has memorized.
4. Ask someone off-site to try it - a friend across town, on their own phone - and tell you exactly what they see.

If any of those comes back blank, slow, wrong, or stuck on an old version, that's your finding. And if you're not sure you could get into the settings to fix it, that's the bigger one.

Common questions

Why does my website work for me but not for my customers?

Usually because your computer and browser have memorized a path to the site that new visitors don't have. You're often on the same network and typing the address the same way every time, so you keep hitting the one route that still works while customers hit a route that doesn't.

What's the difference between the "www" and non-www version of my site?

They're two addresses for the same business, and each has to be pointed at your website separately. If only one was set up, anyone who types the other gets a blank or broken page. Both should land on the same working site.

My site looks fine to me. How do I know if customers can see it?

Check it the way a stranger would: on your phone with wifi off, in a private or incognito window, typed fresh both with and without "www," and have someone off-site try it too. If any of those fails, customers are hitting the problem you can't see.

Who controls whether my website address works?

The domain records do, and whoever holds the account for your domain controls those records. If that's a former web developer or a company you've lost touch with, you may not be able to fix a broken address yourself, which is a bigger risk than any single outage.