You delivered the project, moved on, and then it lands: "Hey, something's broken on the site." Every freelancer knows the small stomach-drop. Here's how to handle it well — and how to make it rare.
In the moment: respond calmly and fast
- Acknowledge quickly, even if you can't fix it that second. Silence makes clients anxious and angry.
- Get specifics: what page, what device, what were they doing. Half of "it's broken" reports are misunderstandings.
- Reproduce before you react. Confirm the actual problem instead of guessing.
- Fix genuine defects promptly; scope-creep requests are a separate, polite conversation.
The real lesson: prevent it
Most "it's broken" emails are about things that were broken at handoff and simply not caught. The fix isn't better emails — it's better QA before delivery.
Build a pre-handoff check
Before you call a project done, run it through a thorough, independent quality pass: forms, checkout, mobile, links, speed. Fix what comes back. Deliver a product that doesn't generate the dreaded email in the first place.
Why independent matters here
You can't reliably catch your own blind spots — the very bugs that trigger these emails are the ones you're least likely to see. An outside check is how you close that gap.
Handling the email well protects the relationship. Preventing the email protects your reputation and your evenings. A QA partner makes prevention easy: at TestPulseQA, developers get a standing discount on the audits they run for client work, precisely so "it's broken" becomes a rare event instead of a routine one.