ClockworkWD has the privilege to “inherit” sites from other developers on a regular basis. Each time we onboard a new website for a care plan, we look through the site and make sure that it is functioning as expected. I can’t believe what we found on this one.
The client currently uses another company for SEO. To be completely honest, I don’t know what the arrangement is, but the client wanted us to check for any red flags. This is pretty typical of what we do in our SEO site audits. We analyze site structure, check indexing, and look at crawlability. There were a few issues in this case but one was doing real damage.
Google Only Saw Half the Site
We found that Google was indexing only half of the pages that Bing was indexing. That led us to look at the sitemap.xml. Low and behold, when I looked at the sitemap, I got this error:
The site returned an error in the site map. This likely affected SEO since the site was built, but the SEO agency they were paying never caught it. We saw similar issues with SteelMart, where fixable website issues were undercutting campaigns built on top. Digging into the code in this case, I saw the WordPress child theme had an error.
Can you see the error in the functions.php file?
Finding the Error in the Code
I know that might be a little hard to read, but the previous developer had an empty line on line #26. Sure, that seems like that wouldn’t be a problem, but in WordPress, we know that an empty line can throw an error. And it sure did.
Removing line 26 fixed the problem. I also know that you don’t need to close your functions.php file (that’s actually recommended by most developers), so I also removed line 24 and 25. Now the sitemap no longer gives us an error:
Have an SEO Expert Review Your Site
These kinds of technical issues show up in our SEO site audits pretty regularly. With AI changing how search works and how search engines evaluate content, having your technical ducks in a row matters more than it used to. It’s not just about keywords and backlinks anymore. Now it’s about whether your site is technically sound, loads quickly, and actually delivers what people are searching for.
If you’re paying someone for SEO services and not seeing results, it’s worth having someone look at what’s actually broken. We’re glad to take a look. There’s no way to know how much revenue was lost because of a simple code error like this one, but I’m sure this client will easily earn back what they spent to fix it. Let’s talk over your current website setup.
