A site can be live, working, and still telling every visitor the wrong thing about who runs the business. This is a real one, and the cause was a single file.
What was actually wrong
The site was serving the hosting company's default red logo instead of the business's own green mark. Not in the header — in the browser tab, the bookmark, the phone home screen. The place a repeat customer actually sees you.
The cause was a stale favicon.ico sitting in the site's root folder, dated 2018. It predated the content system that manages the site's icon, so every setting in the control panel pointed at a correct logo that was never being used. The old file won every time.
Renaming it did not work. This kind of server serves any image file in that folder, so the red icon kept being served under the new name. Deleting it is what fixed it.
The second problem underneath
While in there: the site was running PHP 7.4, which stopped getting security updates in November 2022. It had been running on an unsupported version for years, which was also blocking a plugin update. Moved to 8.3. Worked first try.
Why a contractor should care
A wrong logo and an outdated engine do not look like bugs. They look like nobody's minding the store. That is a trust cost on every visit — and trust is the thing that makes somebody pick up the phone instead of the next name on the list.
If you want to know whether your own site is quietly doing this, I will look at it and tell you what I see. No pitch — see the form below.