There comes a time in some projects where you have to just stop.
In the last several months we had to do this with one of our projects. It was built about 8 months ago on a tight deadline with loose parameters from the client and had a LOT of complex content and integrations built into it. We got it done on time but without enough testing and time quickly aged the site. It started to get to where 3-4 issues would be coming into this client’s PM every week and we would constantly be in and out of the site fixing little issues.
So I cut it off and said “we’re stopping”.
All development was halted, all incoming issues tossed into a single ticket instead of immediately addressed and I went through every page of the site on every browser we test on with every device in our device lab and proceeded to fix every single bug. It was expensive from a time perspective, it was pretty painful to see all that we missed, and it took away from our other active projects.
We’ve had 1 bug come through in the month since we did the audit & repair on the site. Where we were spending a couple of hours a week going in and out, we now are bidding out more work for this client and they couldn’t be happier.
Sometimes, you just have to step back, put on the blinders and ruthlessly fix everything that’s wrong on a project. It will be painful short-term but you’ll end up with a smoothly working site and happy clients.