Website maintenance nobody does until something breaks

Aug 29
3 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Introduction

The site was built, launched, and handed over. Since then somebody has occasionally added a page. Nobody has checked whether the contact form still sends, whether the backups exist, or whether the software running it has been updated in three years.

None of this is urgent until it is all urgent simultaneously. The characteristic failure is a business discovering, after a fortnight of silence, that enquiries stopped arriving when a plugin updated. The prevention is a short list of checks taking well under an hour a month, none of which requires technical skill beyond reading a confirmation email.

1. Website maintenance nobody does begins with testing the enquiry route

The check with the highest value.

Send a test enquiry through every form on the site and confirm it arrives. Forms break silently when plugins update, when an address changes or when a mailbox fills, and the business finds out only by inference several weeks later.

2. Confirm the backups exist and can be restored

Untested backups are not backups.

Check that they run, that they include the database as well as the files, and that a restore has actually been attempted at least once. Discovering that a backup is incomplete or corrupt during an actual incident is the worst possible moment to find out, and it is when most businesses do.

3. Keep the software updated

The main security exposure.

Content systems, plugins and themes accumulate vulnerabilities, and outdated ones are how small sites get compromised. Update on a schedule, immediately after taking a backup, rather than in response to an incident that has already happened.

4. Watch the certificate expiry

A total outage from an administrative lapse.

An expired certificate produces a full-page browser warning that stops visitors entirely. Confirm renewal is automatic and that the notification address belongs to somebody still at the company.

5. Check the domain renewal and who controls it

The most damaging thing to lose.

Domains expire, and businesses regularly discover theirs is registered to a former developer's personal account. Verify the ownership, the expiry date and the administrative contact address once a year, and move the registration if it is not in the company's name.

6. Look for broken links and missing images

Ordinary decay.

Pages get renamed, external sites restructure, and media libraries get reorganised. A crawl twice a year finds these before a customer does.

7. Review content that has silently become wrong

The most visible neglect.

Prices, opening hours, staff, services withdrawn and pages describing an old process. Wrong information costs more than missing information, because it produces confident bad decisions.

8. Monitor whether the site is actually up

Do not rely on noticing.

An uptime service checks every few minutes and notifies you, free at small scale. Businesses have gone entire weekends offline because the outage began after everybody stopped looking.

9. Write down who is responsible

The reason none of this happens.

Every item above requires a named person and a frequency. Maintenance is not skipped because somebody weighed it up and decided against it. It is skipped because it was never written down as anybody's job in the first place.

Keep the access details somewhere the business controls. Hosting logins, domain accounts, platform administration and analytics access sitting only with an individual is one resignation away from being a serious problem.

Conclusion

Treat this as a short monthly list rather than a project, because the failures are cheap to prevent and expensive to discover.

Send a test enquiry through every form, verify backups exist and can actually be restored, update software on a schedule after backing up, confirm certificates renew automatically to a monitored address, check domain ownership and expiry annually, crawl for broken links twice a year, review content that has quietly become wrong, use an uptime monitor rather than relying on noticing, name the person responsible for each item, and keep all access details under the business's control.