Running a site you can maintain

The question that decides whether a site stays useful is not how it was built but whether you can change it. A site nobody can edit stops being updated, and a site that is not updated becomes wrong.

The maintenance that is not optional

• Security updates, if you run software that needs them. An unmaintained site is eventually a compromised one, and a compromised site can damage your search position and your reputation at once.
• Backups you have actually restored from. An untested backup is a belief, not a backup.
• Domain and certificate renewal, which should be automatic and is worth checking once a year, because an expired certificate makes a site look dangerous to every visitor.
• Link checking, since links rot quietly.
• Reviewing what is out of date: prices, availability, policies, anything with a year in it.

Keep a list of what it is made of

Unglamorous and it is the thing most needed when something goes wrong, usually at an inconvenient time.

1. 01Where the domain is registered and when it renews.
2. 02Where the site is hosted and how to reach it.
3. 03What it is built with, and who built it if it was not you.
4. 04Where the backups are and how to restore one.
5. 05Which third-party services it depends on: payments, forms, email, analytics.
6. 06Where the logins are, in a password manager rather than in a document.

One page, kept current. It is also what makes it possible to hand the site to somebody else, or to recover it if the person who built it is unreachable.

The quarterly half hour

1. 01Complete your main action yourself, on a phone, and confirm the resulting message arrives.
2. 02Check the three pages with the most traffic for anything out of date.
3. 03Run a link check.
4. 04Look at your speed figures and compare with last quarter.
5. 05Apply whatever updates are waiting, after a backup.

Thirty minutes, four times a year. That is the whole maintenance programme for a small site, and it prevents nearly every expensive surprise that happens to small sites.

Owning your own domain

The one piece that must be yours, and the one most often not. A domain registered in a developer's account, or by an agency as a convenience, is a dependency on a relationship, and relationships end at inconvenient moments.

Check it now: the registration should be in your name, with your email as the contact, with the login in your possession and auto-renewal on. Everything else can be rebuilt. A domain somebody else controls can hold your business hostage, and it happens often enough that it is worth the ten minutes to verify.

The quiet expiries

• The domain itself, which should renew automatically on a card that has not expired.
• The certificate, which is usually automatic and worth confirming, because a lapsed one puts a warning in front of every visitor.
• The card on file for hosting, which fails silently and then noisily.
• Authorisations for anything connected: forms, payments, mail, analytics. These expire on their own schedule and break one feature at a time.
• The contact address on all of the above, which is frequently somebody's old email and therefore receives every warning you would have wanted.

What to do when it goes down

Decide in advance, because the moment it happens is the worst time to work it out. Confirm it is actually down rather than down for you, check the host's status page, and look at whether anything changed in the last day, which is the cause more often than anything else. Then tell customers, somewhere they can see, which is usually whichever social profile you maintain. An hour of silence does more damage than the outage.

Reviewing the content once a year

Sites go wrong by staying the same while the business changes. Once a year, read every page as a stranger: prices that have moved, a service you no longer offer, a member of staff who left, opening hours from a different era, a policy that predates how you actually work. It takes an afternoon, it is the least interesting thing in this article, and it prevents the specific embarrassment of a customer quoting your own site back at you.