Process
Launch Day Isn't the Finish Line
By the LA Web Design team6 min read
A website is closer to a vehicle than a painting. It launches in good shape and then everything around it moves — browsers update, plugins change, the phone number changes, a service gets dropped, a photo goes stale. Two years of nothing is what turns a website that worked into one that embarrasses you.
Updates and backups, which belong together
Software updates patch security holes, and out-of-date plugins are the most common way small business websites get hacked. But updates occasionally break things, which is why they belong next to backups. Run automatic backups somewhere other than your hosting account, and know how to restore one. A backup you've never tested is a hope, not a plan.
The content that quietly goes wrong
Staff who left. Hours that changed. A service you stopped offering that still has a page. Last year's seasonal promotion sitting on the homepage. None of this breaks anything technically, which is exactly why nobody catches it. Walk the website once a quarter and read it as a customer would.
Broken links and missing images
Links rot. Pages get renamed, outside websites disappear, and images go missing when files get reorganized. A free link checker will crawl the whole website and hand you a list in a few minutes. Fix them or redirect them. A dead end costs you a visitor and tells search engines the website isn't maintained.
Watch the forms and the email
Contact forms break silently, and the usual cause is an email change or a hosting policy that starts filtering messages. Send yourself a test submission once a month. This is the highest-consequence item on the list, because a broken form looks exactly like a quiet month.
Check the numbers you'd otherwise guess at
Once a month, look at which pages get traffic, which searches bring people in, and where visitors leave. You don't need to become an analyst. You're looking for obvious signals: a page that used to get traffic and stopped, a search term you didn't expect, a page everyone abandons immediately.
Keep the renewals somewhere you'll see them
Domain registration and security certificates expire, and an expired domain can take the website and the email down at the same time. Put both on auto-renew with a card that isn't about to expire, and set a reminder in a calendar you actually read.
An hour a month
None of this is difficult and none of it takes long. The difference between a website that keeps earning and one that decays is roughly an hour a month, spent on purpose instead of in a panic after something breaks.