Miallies
My friend's website accidentally developed a second personality
A receipt about a store quietly splitting itself across `www` and non-`www`, and making the founder think demand had died when the website was actually doing internet crimes.
A creator friend asked me to look at her website because customers kept DMing things like:
"I saw something on your site and went back later and it was gone??"
Which is honestly nightmare fuel for small business owners because now you are sitting there like:
- am I blind
- are customers hallucinating
- is the internet beefing with me personally
- do I smell burnt toast
So we went through the website together.
Products were there. Inventory looked fine. Nothing looked obviously broken.
Which, unfortunately, is how internet problems work.
What was happening
Customers were getting inconsistent versions of the same store.
Some people could see products. Some people could not. Things felt unstable and random in the exact way that makes a founder think the audience has suddenly gone cold.
What was actually causing it
The website was quietly running off two separate URLs:
www.madeupstorename.commadeupstorename.com
Most people think those are the same thing.
The internet absolutely does not.
So what was happening was:
- some people landed on one version
- some landed on another
- products behaved differently
- traffic split
- indexing split
- customer experiences got weird
Meanwhile the founder is over here thinking:
"maybe people just don't want my stuff anymore"
No babe. Your website just became twins.
What changed
The first fix was straightforward: make the site behave like one actual store instead of two barely-related cousins.
And yes, fixing that immediately exposed another weird little issue underneath it.
Which honestly is every website ever.
You move one haunted cupboard and suddenly there is another haunted cupboard behind it.
What got quieter
The panic spiral changed shape immediately.
Instead of wondering whether customers were imagining things, we had a real explanation:
- traffic inconsistency stopped feeling mysterious
- customer confusion had a technical cause
- the founder could stop blaming demand for a website problem
This is exactly why receipts matter.
Sometimes the issue is not your offer.
Sometimes your website has just been quietly freelancing behind your back for months.