Nothing on a website stays working by itself

A website gets signed off, goes live, and everyone moves on. That is the correct thing to do. The mistake is the assumption underneath it: that the thing you signed off is the thing that will still be there in eighteen months.

It will not be, and not because anyone touched it. A website is the only thing a business buys where the ground moves underneath it while it sits still. Browsers change. The software it runs on gets new versions. Cards expire, certificates lapse, a plugin’s author gives up. None of that requires you to have done anything wrong.

This is worth understanding before anyone tries to sell you a maintenance plan, because it decides whether you need one at all — and quite often, you do not.

Why a finished website stops being finished

Your site is not one piece of software. It is a stack of them, each maintained by a different party on their own schedule, and each one moves without asking you.

The server runs a version of PHP that hosts retire on a published timetable. The site runs a content management system that ships security releases. On top of that sit the plugins, written by different people, some of whom are companies and some of whom are one person who has since taken a full-time job.

Everything works right up until two of those move at different speeds. That is the whole mechanism, and it explains almost every “the website just broke” call anyone has ever received.

The things that actually break

Updates, and the fear of them

Skipping updates feels safe, because updating is when things visibly break. It is the opposite of safe. Known security holes in popular plugins are published, indexed and scanned for automatically, so an out-of-date site is found by software, not by a person who chose you.

The real answer is not “update everything immediately” either. It is to have somewhere to update first: a copy of the site nobody visits. And a backup you have restored at least once, so that you know it works.

The things with expiry dates

Domains, certificates and payment cards all expire, usually to an email address nobody reads any more. A lapsed certificate puts a full-page browser warning in front of every visitor. A lapsed domain takes your email down with the site.

These are the cheapest failures to prevent and among the most damaging to experience, which is an unusually bad combination. Renewal dates in a shared calendar, on a card that is not about to expire, prevents nearly all of it.

Forms that stop sending, quietly

This is the failure that costs the most, because nothing announces it. Email delivery rules tighten, a mail provider changes an authentication requirement, a form plugin updates, and enquiries stop arriving. The form still says thank you. Visitors think they contacted you. You think business is slow.

Test your own contact form once a month from an address that is not yours, and check that the reply-to is right. It takes two minutes. While you are in there, look at how many fields it asks for, because every extra question is another chance for someone to change their mind.

Speed, which decays without anyone deciding it should

Sites get slower the way garages get fuller. A tracking script for a campaign that ended. A chat widget from a trial. A plugin doing work on every page load for a feature used on one. Each addition was defensible; the total was never reviewed.

Performance is not a thing you achieve once. It is a thing that drifts, and reviewing what a page loads twice a year is usually enough to catch it. If your site already feels slower than it did, that is worth fixing before considering a redesign, because it is a fraction of the cost and it is often the actual complaint.

Content that has quietly become wrong

Prices from two years ago. A team member who left. Opening hours from before you changed them. A service you no longer offer, still ranking, still bringing in enquiries you have to turn down.

No software will tell you about any of this. It is the one category that needs a person who knows the business to read the site as a stranger would, twice a year.

When you do not need a maintenance plan

Plenty of sites do not, and it is worth saying so plainly.

If your site is a handful of pages on a hosted platform where the provider maintains the software, most of the list above is not yours to worry about. That is what you are paying the platform for. Buying a maintenance retainer on top is often buying the same thing twice.

If your site does not take payments, does not store customer accounts, and gets modest traffic, the honest requirement is a working backup, current updates, and someone reachable when something goes wrong. That is not nothing, but it is not a monthly retainer either.

The case for a plan gets real when downtime costs money by the hour, when the site takes payments or holds customer data, when there are enough moving parts that an update genuinely might break something, or when nobody in the business wants to be the person who has to care. That last one is a legitimate reason. Buying it back is a reasonable purchase; being sold it as though it were a technical necessity is not.

The question to ask any provider is what happens when something breaks at nine on a Saturday — and whether the answer is a person or a ticket queue. Everything else on a maintenance quote is roughly the same everywhere.

What to do first

In order. The first three cost nothing.

1. Test your own contact form. Send yourself a message from an address outside your business, and confirm it arrives and replies correctly.
2. Diarise the domain and certificate. Find out when each expires and put both in a calendar the whole business can see.
3. Ask about backups. Find out when the last one was taken, and whether anyone has ever restored one.
4. Read the site on a phone. Use mobile data rather than office wi-fi, and note anything factually out of date.
5. Only then consider a plan. Price it against the four things above rather than against a competitor’s plan.

If that list turns up something you would rather not deal with yourself, that is the kind of thing we take on — and we will tell you when the answer is that you do not need us monthly.

Start with the contact form. It is the failure most likely to already be happening, and it is the one nobody would have told you about.