I Audited My Own Website. Here Is Everything That Was Wrong.

johnschuster.net, September 2026

I have built websites for more than 25 years, and my own site had been running for fifteen of them. In July 2026 it was moved off an old multi-site installation onto its own. It looked fine. In September I ran the same audit on it that I now run for clients, using an AI-assisted workflow, and fixed what it found the same day. This is the unflattering list.

What was broken, and nobody had noticed

• Three pages crashed with a server error. Old shop pages still called a plugin that had been removed.
• The main link on my homepage opened an image file instead of my Chicago web designer page. An uploaded picture had quietly taken the page’s address.
• About a hundred images were missing across 54 posts, plus one reference on every single page, all pointing at a folder from the old installation.
• Fourteen forms had silently stopped working, including the estimate form every button pointed to. The form plugin had not survived the move, so visitors saw a line of code where the form should be.
• My second most visible page in Google, with about 1,600 search impressions a month and zero clicks, turned out to be one 85-word paragraph pasted seven times, with no main heading.
• Some sixty pages were competing with each other in search: every portfolio item was titled “Chicago Web Designer”, and an import had published six articles three and four times each.
• Four security exposures: an outdated file browser open to anyone, the administrator account listed publicly, an unused access key, and no security headers.
• Dozens of smaller things: dead buy buttons for products that no longer existed, leftover code from uninstalled plugins printed on the page, a contract governed by the wrong state.

What was done, the same day

• Every fix was written as a repeatable script, run first on a private copy, then on a staging site, and only then on the live site, with a database backup before each step.
• Crashing pages retired with redirects; image paths repaired; every form replaced with a working one and tested.
• A keyword map: one page per search intent. Forty-three competing pages were retired as drafts, nothing was deleted, and every old address redirects to the right page.
• The broken service page rebuilt properly; thin pages filled in; a real FAQ with structured data; name, address and phone made consistent.
• The security holes closed and security headers added.
• After every step, all of the site’s pages were crawled again: every page loading, no broken internal links, no errors in the server log.

What it would have taken the old way

Honestly, most of it would never have been found. Nobody checks every page of a 280-page site by hand, so problems like these sit there for years. Done manually, the checking alone is days of work, and the fixes are weeks of evenings. With an AI-assisted workflow the checking is complete rather than sampled, and the time goes into decisions instead of clicking.

Results

The technical results were immediate: no crashing pages, no broken images, working forms on every page. Search results take longer. The baseline is 28 clicks from 12,536 impressions in the four weeks before the work, with the three main pages sitting on page two of Google. I will update this page with the numbers once Google has had time to respond.

What this means for your site

If a web designer’s own site can carry this much hidden damage, yours probably carries some too. A website audit finds it, and Site Care keeps it from coming back. Here is how I use AI to do the work, and who checks it.