Are You Building or Repairing? Some days don’t go as planned

Are You Building or Repairing?

Some days just don’t go as planned.

October 14, 2026
Gem
5 minute read

Even a Systems Strategist isn’t immune to this.

There are days when you build, and days when you repair. This is one of the repair days.

The day that was going well, right up until it wasn't

Picture it. Friday afternoon, creeping toward 5pm. Productive all day, things getting ticked off the list one after another.

Write and send email ✅
Add social links to footer ✅
Create social media planner ✅

Then I got to the next one. Duplicate footer for sales page.

Seemed simple enough. Except my footer wouldn’t show up on the sales page, no matter what I told Elementor’s display settings to do.

Side note, because I know you’re going to ask, why bother duplicating a footer just for a sales page? The point of a sales page is to sell. You don’t want people wandering off it aimlessly, forgetting what they came there to do. Anyone who’s been to Walmart or B&M will know exactly what I mean.

So I duplicated it, stripped out the bits I didn’t want, saved it, and set the rules.

Checked the page. Not there.

Checked the other pages, the main site footer was showing fine there. Went back, purged the cache, checked again. Still not there.

What had actually happened

I’d set two conditions: “Include the whole site, exclude this one page” on one footer, and “Exclude the whole site, include this one page” on another. Made sense in my head. Didn’t work in practice.

Turns out Elementor’s condition logic always lets Exclude win, no matter how specific your Include rule is. If “Exclude Entire Site” is sitting anywhere in the mix, it beats an Include for a single page, because technically “Entire Site” already covers that page too. The fix was simply removing the Exclude entirely and leaving the Include to do its job alone. Sometimes less really is more.

Then I checked the rest of the site, because if there’s one problem, there’s usually a second one waiting nearby.

Sure enough, there was.

A quick top tip here: while it’s worth finding your problems, don’t go looking for them on a Friday afternoon at 5pm. Leave it if it’s not an emergency, or you may well find yourself still at your desk at 8pm with a cat yelling at you about a dinner you forgot an hour ago.

The colour that wasn't actually the same colour

While checking that the footer fix had held, I noticed something else. The exact same background colour, used site-wide, was showing up as two visibly different shades depending on whether an image was involved.

Same background, same hex code, one page looked right, the other looked washed out and paler than it should. Nothing had changed except which container type the section was built with.

Turns out Elementor’s older Classic containers and newer Atomic containers handle hex codes with a built-in transparency value differently. One of them simply wasn’t reading the transparency correctly. After spending a good thirty minutes trying to track down a discrepancy between the two hex codes, the discovery that they were identical the entire time was not the satisfying twist I was hoping for. I gave up chasing the cause and gave it a simple fix instead, uploading the image with a transparent background to sidestep the colour issue entirely.

Done. Sorted.

The plugin that told on another plugin

Feeling productive, I decided to install an analytics plugin to see how many people were actually visiting the site.

Downloaded it. Installed it. Activated it. Off I went.

Or did I?

My new analytics plugin quietly told on my caching plugin. WP Statistics popped up a notice saying my tracking script might not be running properly because of LiteSpeed Cache. Worth taking seriously, since undercounted visits are the kind of problem you don’t notice until you’re wondering why your numbers look lower than they should.

So into the LiteSpeed Cache settings I went, following instructions I’d previously had AI generate for me, and crossing my fingers it was giving me the right ones this time.

Hit save. It worked.

That felt like a sensible point to call it a day.

Why any of this is worth writing down

None of these problems were dramatic, though I’ll quietly admit my reaction to each of them was a little more dramatic than the problem deserved. The colour mismatch was annoying at best, even if it risked looking slightly unprofessional to a prospective client. The footer issue, I could have just reverted. The low visitor numbers, I could easily have spiralled about and decided the website just wasn’t good enough.

None of these were big. But each one took time, effort, and actual research to understand, not just what was happening, but why.

The lesson, because there's always one

Every time you solve a problem like this, you learn something, often something you wouldn’t have gone looking for on purpose. I now know three slightly odd, slightly niche things about how Elementor behaves, so the next time a client asks why their footer isn’t showing, or why their site has three versions of the same colour, I already know where to look.

You don’t need experience in everything. If you’ve ever watched someone else do something clever with a platform you’ve used for years and realised you had no idea it could do that, I’m right there with you. The reframe that actually helps is this: every problem you solve is something learned, not something failed. That knowledge doesn’t just stay with you either, it’s something you can carry into your business and apply in your own way, for yourself and for the people you end up helping.