Helping Your Web Developer: Effective Website Error Reporting For Website Owners

When an error suddenly appears in your website, it can be “game over” until it has been resolved; your website pages may all display ugly error messages, or may not work at all until the issue is fixed. For website owners who don’t have an in-house website developer, it can be even more frustrating to figure out the fastest way to get these issues resolved as quickly as possible. In this article we offer some tips for website owners on effective website error reporting, to better help your web developers resolve website issues as quickly as possible.

Understanding Your Web Developer

When your website suddenly breaks down, our first instinct is to report the issue to your web developer immediately through our preferred method of contact. It may be a phone call, or an email, or a text message to your developer telling them “My website is broke! Please fix it immediately!”. But before you do that, have you considered what is the best way to report an issue that helps your web developer resolve it as quickly as possible?

Very few website owners take into account that each professional website development company or individual website developers differ in how they do business. Just because you were able to get a quick resolution once by sending a late night text message, doesn’t mean that it’s the best method for your web developer. Following some simple steps can make the difference between having your issue resolved in days, versus hours or minutes.

STEP 1 – Where Do You Report Errors?

The first step in effective website error reporting is to ask your developer what is their preferred method of reporting website errors; it may be an email, or they may offer a trouble ticket system, or some other similar method. Understand that whatever method they have in place isn’t meant to be an inconvenience for you, but rather to allow them to be as efficient as possible in their response and resolution time.

STEP 2 – When Do They Work?

Another common misconception is that all web developers work 24/7; if you report an issue at 2am, they MUST get it resolved immediately, otherwise they are not competent. Unless you have a team of developers under expensive contract for 24/7 support, they will have normal business hours. Some developers may even offer emergency services for an additional cost outside of normal business hours. Find out what their hours are for resolving website errors, what their policies are for reports outside of normal work days and hours.  If you are reporting an issue outside of their normal business hours, be patient.

STEP 3 – How Do You Test Your Website?

Many times error reports will come from your customers, which makes sense since they will be effectively using your website more often than you will in ways you may not have thought of. Our first instinct at these reports from customers is usually frustration and the loss of a potential sale. The more customer reports we get, the more frustrating it can be and it can create unproductive arguments between yourself and your developers.

While customer reporting is a great tool for recognizing website issues, the fact is the majority of the time the reports are either inaccurate, missing key pieces of information, or only effecting that single customer due to their computer and device setup. Some common examples of this include:

• The customer is using an outdated browser like Internet Explorer, which your website doesn’t support.
• The customer is trying to login to your website using a wrong password or wrong email address.
• The customer’s billing address doesn’t match their credit card and was declined during checkout.

The best way to combat this and determine if it’s a legitimate error report, is to perform your own website testing before reporting to your developer. If your developer hasn’t already provided you with instructions on how to you can test your website, ask them. Many times they will already have tools in place for you to do this. Some of the most common practices for testing your own website include:

• Creating your own customer account and trying to duplicate the reported issues.
• Logging in as the customer to try to see what they are seeing; depending upon your website platform, there are usually various plugins both paid and free that can help you to login as a customer. In example for our customers who use WooCommerce, we install the “Shop as Customer for WooCommerce” plugin that allows a website admin to easily login as any customer.

Doing testing first before reporting, can save both you and your website developer valuable time and cost. In addition if you are on a maintenance contract with your developer, it can save you valuable time that could be better used for actual errors, if it turns out that the customer report was not accurate.

STEP 4 – Gathering Information

There is an old saying within our company related to resolving website errors; “If we can’t break it, we can’t fix it”. This means if your web developers cannot figure out exactly how to reproduce the error you or your customers have seen, they cannot quickly get it fixed. So to save time and cost, you will want to gather as much information as possible. It is better to send over too much information, than not enough and waste valuable time that could be used to already have your website errors resolved.

Following these easy steps in gathering information to provide to your developers, will make the difference in a speedy resolution for effective website error reporting. We suggest you have a document prepared with these questions and your answers each time you have an issue.

1. What is your website domain?
This may seem like an obvious answer, but keep in mind that your website developer likely has many client websites. Providing them with your website domain can save time in their resolution to your website issues.

2. Who is reporting the issue and what were they using?
Let your developer know if the error was encountered by yourself or one of your customers, and provide them with information about the device being used when the error was encountered. Knowing the setup of the computer or device used when the error was found, can make a tremendous difference in tracking it down as quickly as possible. Many times issues may turn out to be an issue with that person’s device, browser, outdated operating system, or similar.

This may seem like a very tedious request, but there are free tools across the internet to help anyone find out this information easily. The tool we recommend for all of our clients to determine the device being used is the website WhatsMyBrowser.org. Simply have the person who ran across this error go to this website using the same device they originally used, click on the COPY link, and paste it back into an email response to you.

While having this information is not necessary for resolving issues, it will definitely help speed up the process.

3. Briefly describe the issue:
Provide your developer with a quick summary of what the issue is.

4. What page did the error occur on:
Find out what page the error occurred on and describe the name of the page, or ideally copy the URL of that page.

5. What error message is displayed:
If there is an error message displayed on the page in question, copy it for your developer. This may look something like this:

Warning: fopen(welcome.txt) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream:
No such file or directory in https://www.yoursite.com/test.php on line 2

or

Error: [8] Undefined variable: test

While this step is a bit more difficult to obtain, if you can obtain this information for your customer or via your own testing, it can help speed up the resolution process even more.

Effective Website Error Reporting Conclusion

Having an error on your website can be a frustrating experience for website owners. TPP Web Solutions has been in business since 1998 and we have worked to continually improve our own customer tools for effective website error reporting. We hope that our experiences and advice will help you to have a successful website, and help your web developers to be able to resolve your website errors more quickly. If you are interested in finding out more about what we can do for your company, or our website maintenance contracts, please contact us today.