bemunchieonline.co.uk

Extremely disappointing service - AVOID at all costs!

Extremely disappointing service - AVOID at all costs! This has been the most stressful and costly experience our business has faced with a service provider. We initially engaged this company for SEO on our existing website, which was functioning well. We were simply looking for more online visibility. The representative claimed our current website “wasn’t good enough for SEO” and insisted we pay for a new website with integrated SEO before any work could commence. We trusted this advice. While waiting for the new site, we checked the representative's company website for examples of their work. The sites appeared impressive, which gave us some reassurance. However, we noticed that their pricing page listed a “professional website” package at £500 less than what we had paid for our site (over £2000), which was supposed to include SEO and premium features. We didn’t question it at the time because we were eager to get a professional website that would rank well on search engines. After months of delays, the website we received was essentially a copy of our original site — far less stable, with only a few targeted keywords added to a handful of landing pages. From that point, the situation worsened. The site went down repeatedly, lost content and images, and left customers unable to reach us. This continued for over a year, despite repeated assurances that issues were resolved permanently. Despite paying for SEO for two years, we saw almost no improvement in rankings or inquiries. In fact, our main keyword ranking declined significantly. The only visible on-page SEO consisted of a few added keywords. Months of missed SEO meetings, ignored emails, and persistent downtime characterized our experience. We conducted our own audits pointing out major backend issues, which we were told to overlook. They also insisted we use their database instead of standard analytics tools, where their reported progress showed success while our data indicated poor performance. Worried that little SEO work was being done, a family friend installed a monitoring plugin and optimized one landing page to guide them. Shortly thereafter, the website was reverted to an older version, erasing all progress. They blamed an outdated plugin, and later changes were shown to be made under our admin username, making it seem like we were responsible if anything went wrong. When the website broke again, shockingly we were blamed, despite having invested thousands with them—an outrageous accusation. We also faced significant hosting issues, including a virus that brought the site down for three weeks, disrupting our operations and forcing staff to stay home. Although this was due to their hosting, we were charged to fix it. Each downtime involved restoring older backups, deleting paid changes, and then incurring additional charges. Recently, a team member confessed that our SEO payments were being used for maintenance instead of SEO, after two years of being misled. Now we are left with a website that is ineffective for anyone—shameful is an understatement. After two years of stress, lost revenue, and ongoing downtime, we switched to a new provider, who accomplished more in one week than this company did in two years. We have now requested a refund and compensation for financial losses, as the website crashed 2–3 times per month for over a year. Within hours of requesting the refund, the website crashed again, losing content and images, and loading extremely slowly, raising serious concerns about customer control over their own websites. If this situation is not resolved professionally within the next few days, we WILL initiate formal legal action to recover all costs and lost revenue. After seeking professional advice, we have been informed that we have a strong case for a refund and compensation for our treatment. I rarely leave poor reviews, but this company should not be operating. I hope others do not fall victim to the same terrible experience we endured. Additionally, it is evident from other reviews that we are not the only ones who were misled and mistreated.

Date of experience: Nov 30, 2025