Why Your Website Needs Maintenance After Launch

There is a particular kind of phone call we receive regularly. A business launches a website, everything works, then six months later the site either goes down, becomes slow, or starts showing a security warning to visitors — and nobody knows why.

The reason is almost never dramatic. It is that a website is not finished when it goes live. It is a system that needs looking after.

What actually breaks

Unpatched software

Content management systems, themes and plugins ship with security fixes that have to be applied. Skip them and you accumulate publicly known vulnerabilities that automated scanners find within hours of going online.

Expired certificates

SSL certificates expire. When they do, browsers warn visitors, and some visitors click through. Others do not — they leave.

Backups that were never tested

A backup you have never restored from is a hypothesis, not a backup. The real test happens on the day you need it, which is the worst possible time to discover it was incomplete.

Disk space and databases that quietly fill up

Mail queues, logs, session files and cached data all grow. When the disk fills, a site can stop responding entirely.

Certificates and dependencies that quietly expire

Third-party APIs, fonts, libraries and services your site depends on change or shut down. Nothing warned you.

Nobody is actually watching

This is the big one. A site that goes down at 02:00 on a Sunday is a site nobody notices until Monday morning — unless something is monitoring it.

What ongoing maintenance covers

• Platform, theme and plugin updates applied and tested
• Security monitoring and patching
• Automated backups, with restores tested and confirmed
• SSL certificate renewal
• Uptime and performance monitoring with alerting
• Malware scanning
• Database and disk housekeeping
• Small content and configuration changes as needed

The uncomfortable question

Ask any website owner what their monthly maintenance costs, and what their hosting provider's name is. If they cannot answer both, their website is running on goodwill — and goodwill does not apply security patches at 3am.

A website is a system that needs looking after. Launching it is the beginning, not the end.

What it should cost

For a typical small business website, reasonable ongoing maintenance is a modest monthly amount — usually less than the cost of a single hour of emergency troubleshooting, spread across the year.

What is not reasonable is finding out after the fact that your backups were failing, your certificate expired last month, and the person who built the site no longer answers their phone.

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