Website maintenance

What actually breaks

Contact forms stop delivering. Links to other businesses go dead. Prices change and the page does not. A member of staff leaves and their photograph stays. Those four account for most of what goes wrong.

Notice that none of them are technical. A modern hosted site does not rot in the way software does, and the failures are almost entirely about information going out of date.

The exception is anything requiring renewal. A lapsed domain takes a site down completely and is the single most damaging thing on this page.

None of that is a reason for alarm. It is a reason for a short routine, because every item on the list is cheap to check and expensive to discover late.

The monthly check

Submit your own contact form and confirm the enquiry arrives. That is the most valuable twenty seconds of maintenance available and almost nobody does it.

Then look at your opening hours, prices and service list, and ask whether all of it is still true. That is usually the whole monthly job.

Our page on contact forms covers why silence from a form is indistinguishable from nobody using it, which is why this check has to be deliberate.

Send the test from a phone rather than the computer you built the site on. That catches the mobile-only faults, which are the ones a business owner is least likely to encounter by accident.

What belongs in a routine

The list below is a realistic maintenance routine for a small business site. Anything not on it is either automatic or is not maintenance at all.

• Submit the contact form and confirm delivery
• Confirm hours, prices and services are current
• Check for broken links, a few times a year
• Confirm the domain and any certificate are renewed
• Confirm a recent backup exists and restores
• Review photographs for anything out of date
• Read the pages you would show a customer

The yearly pass

Once a year, read the whole site as a stranger would. Things that were true at launch quietly stop being true, and nobody notices because nobody rereads their own pages.

Check the year in your copyright line, any date-stamped claim, and any page describing something you no longer offer. Those are the details that make a site look abandoned.

Our page on when to redesign covers the larger question this pass sometimes raises. Most years the answer is no, and the yearly read is what tells you.

What you can safely ignore

Most of what is sold as maintenance. On a hosted platform, software updates, security patching and server work are the provider's job and are included in what you pay.

Monthly reports nobody reads are also not maintenance. A report that does not change a decision is a subscription, and our page on analytics covers which numbers do change decisions.

And do not redesign because a year has passed. Age is not a fault and a site that still works does not need replacing on a schedule.

What is genuinely useful is a short written record of what you checked and when. It takes a line, and it turns a vague sense that the site is fine into something you can actually point at.

Who does it

You can. None of the monthly list requires technical skill and all of it requires knowing your own business, which nobody else does.

Where an agreement covers maintenance, ask exactly what it includes. Hosting and updates are worth paying for; a retainer that produces a monthly report and no changes is not.

Put the monthly check in a calendar. Maintenance fails because it is nobody's specific job on any specific day, not because anybody decided against it.

The cost of skipping it

A broken contact form is the expensive one. Enquiries stop and nothing indicates a problem, so businesses discover it months later when somebody mentions they never heard back.

Out-of-date information is the slow one. A wrong price or a closed-on-Monday that is no longer true costs individual customers quietly, one at a time.

Everything else on this page is minor by comparison. If you do only the monthly form check, you have covered most of the actual risk.