The past month has been a milestone month at Fanatic. We celebrated our 25th birthday, had our first tour of the new office, and Ian and Dan headed to Denver to meet with clients. We’ve also been diving deep into accessibility research and solving some interesting technical challenges. Here is just a taste of what we have been working on this month.
In their latest blog, our accessibility team focused on the importance of hospitality companies integrating accessibility features into their websites. The blog discusses the barriers that disabled people can face when trying to book tables, order food, or even just browse menus online. According to the UK government’s 2025 accessibility report, 57% of disabled adults reported difficulties using hospitality services, which is a significant portion of potential customers struggling to get through the digital front door.
So what can restaurants actually do about it? The practical steps include ensuring content is clear and structured properly with headings and alt text, making sure navigation and booking systems work with assistive tools like keyboards and screen readers, designing accessible contact forms and customer support channels, and most importantly, building accessibility in from the start rather than trying to retrofit it later. These changes make services usable for everyone whilst directly increasing conversions and customer loyalty.
Read the full blog on our website.
Our Development team had to solve a peculiar bug this month that started affecting some of our client sites. It began when Google Search Console suddenly started reporting masses of server errors on pages that were actually working fine for visitors.
It turned out that a minor update to the server software had changed how a particular function handled IP addresses, which then caused the Wordfence security plugin to throw fatal errors. The really odd part was that it seemed to mainly affect Google’s crawlers rather than actual site visitors, making it particularly tricky to spot initially. Google’s bots were basically getting locked out, whilst everyone else could browse the sites without issue.
Although Wordfence quickly rolled out a fix to the problem, there can sometimes be a bit of a delay before our plug-in updates. That meant the team had to manually push the latest Wordfence update through to all the affected sites to get everything back to normal.