If you’re a business owner, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard the term technical debt unless you work with code. But you’ve probably felt it.

It shows up when your systems and web-based tools keep breaking after an update. When a small tweak turns into an expensive rebuild. When a developer disappears and you’re struggling to find somebody to pick up where they left off.

This isn’t bad luck — and I’m afraid to say, this is entirely due to bad foundations.

A true story

Retina Digital recently worked with a client who needed some basic changes to their WordPress website involving some bespoke, custom layouts. There were a couple of performance issues, and some usability issues to boot.

Once you scratch beneath the surface, the technical debt became immediately clear.

The previous developers had directly edited core files and plugin files. Instead of extending them in a way suitable for best industry practices, they’d modified everything. There was no child theme. No custom plugin. No documentation.

That last one is a huge consideration.

To any developer, this is basic. To a business owner entrusting their developer, this is completely invisible. Everything looked fine. Until it broke.

Something that should have taken a quick 30-minute update turned into hours of untangling — and until we spent the time to fix it, every single change from that point forward carried huge risks.

How this becomes your problem

Technical debt doesn’t look like a problem at first. The site works. The system does what it’s supposed to. You’re happy.

But over time:

• Updates break key functionality
• Small changes get expensive
• Developers become reluctant to touch it
• You’re stuck with one person who knows how it all fits together

And when that person disappears — or says they won’t work on it anymore — you’re left with a fragile system that no one wants to touch.

Why it hits smaller businesses hardest

You probably don’t have internal developers or a long-term tech strategy, so you’re working with freelancers or agencies, solving immediate problems as they arise. That’s fine — but it means no one’s watching the long-term stability of your tech setup.

When something goes wrong, it’s you footing the bill, not the developer who took the shortcut. You’re paying twice — and the second time it could be your business reputation and integrity, not just your bank account.

So what can you actually do?

You don’t need to understand the code. But you do need to ask better questions and have a trusting relationship with the team you’re working with.

Ask:

• Will this be easy to update in the future?
• Will this avoid breaking my site after updates?
• Can another developer pick this up without rebuilding it?
• Are you doing this the “right way” or the “quick way”? The quick way is fine, as long as there’s a clear reason and a pathway to the right way.

And to be even more direct: “If another developer picks this up in a year, will they be swearing at you?”

If your developer can’t give you a straight answer to that last one, it’s worth a conversation.