Why a website needs looking after

A website is finished on launch day the way a garden is finished on planting day. Everything is where it should be, and from that moment on it starts to change.

Some of that change is the site itself. The software it runs on gets updates, and the updates matter: most of them close security holes that somebody has already found. Plugins fall out of maintenance. A form that worked for years stops sending because a mail provider tightened its rules. Certificates expire. A hosting plan gets migrated to new hardware and one setting doesn’t come along. None of this announces itself. The site looks the same, right up until it doesn’t.

Some of the change is around the site. Browsers retire old behaviors. Search engines change what they reward. An analytics service shuts down and the tag on every page keeps loading, counting nothing. Links to other sites rot: in one review I did recently, a site of about 1,900 pages had 57 outbound links pointing at pages that no longer exist and 83 that now land somewhere other than promised, often a parked domain serving ads. Nobody had done anything wrong. Time had passed.

And some of the change is in the organization. The person who knew how the site worked moves on. A new program needs a page and gets one that doesn’t match the rest. The address on the contact page is two offices ago.

Looking after a site means someone is responsible for all three. In practice it is a short list of habits:

• Keeping it up. Knowing within minutes if the site goes down, not when a board member emails.
• Keeping it current. Software and plugin updates applied on a schedule, tested, and rolled back if they break something.
• Keeping it secure. Patches applied promptly, access reviewed, the odd settings that harden a server actually set.
• Watching the numbers. Not a dashboard nobody opens, but a regular look at what people came for, where they left, and what that suggests.
• Fixing what the review finds. Broken links, a slow page, a form that dropped its confirmation email.

That last one is where it pays for itself. A review that turns up a problem is only useful if somebody fixes it, and the person who has been looking after the site is the one who can do it in an afternoon.

For most of the sites I build, I am that person afterward. It is quieter work than a launch, and it is most of what makes a launch worth having done.