Most change requests are short. “Change the form’s email address.” “Take the winter program off the site.” Short requests are not small requests, especially when a business runs more than one website. Here are four from this month where doing exactly what was asked would have been the wrong thing.
1. “Change the form’s email address”
A resort group’s sales manager asked for the forms on four new program pages to notify a different desk. Simple. Except every one of those pages used its website’s shared “Contact Us” form. Re-pointing that form in place would have quietly redirected every general inquiry on four websites to a desk that did not want them.
So each site got its own dedicated copy of the form, only the program pages were switched to it, the general contact forms were left exactly as they were, and we told the client what we had done and why. His reply turned into a standing rule for which desk owns which kind of form across two portfolios. Five words in, a routing policy out.
2. Four links in, nine pages out
The same group asked us to remove a discontinued program from the website and sent four links. We did those four. Then we searched every one of their sites for the same claim and found it on nine live pages, including two the email never mentioned and two search-result descriptions that still promised the program to anyone Googling.
While we were in there: three pages still excluded a property that left the portfolio years ago, one seasonal section had been switched off and forgotten so only half the page rendered, and some copy still hedged about 2020 health rules. All of it predated the current team. All of it got cleaned in one pass, with every page backed up first and checked after. A change done to exactly four pages would have left the site contradicting itself in five places.
3. The page we built so nobody could find it
Sometimes the right scope is smaller than it looks. A resort needed a page for its check-in emails: amenities, policies, and some information that should only reach a confirmed guest. We built it as a deliberate orphan. It is not in the navigation, not in the sitemap, not linked from anywhere on the site, and permanently marked for search engines to ignore. It is reachable only from the pre-arrival email. The client approved it the same day with no edits.
Not every page wants traffic. The discipline is deciding which ones, on purpose.
4. The page that wanted traffic and could not get it
The flip side, same portfolio. A resort’s winter-rentals page ranked first in its market and was being cited in Google’s AI answers. Nobody could reach it from the site’s own navigation, and most of what was on it was years-old rates nobody had removed. We rebuilt it carefully on the same address, kept the exact page title that was doing the ranking, replaced the dead content, ran it past the client twice, and only then linked it into the menu. It launched with the ranking intact.
What we do with a short request
- Read it as the starting point. Then look for every other place the same change has to land, including search descriptions and pages the email did not mention.
- Find the shared parts before touching anything. On multi-site businesses a form, a footer, a menu, or a block of copy is often one thing rendered in many places.
- Back up, change, verify, report. Every page touched is saved first and checked after, and the client hears what we did beyond the ask, and why.
- Decide what should not be reachable, on purpose. Orphans are fine when they are chosen.
None of this takes much longer than the literal request. It mostly takes asking “where else?” before you start.