Website maintenance, performance and analytics

A website is not a finished thing. It is software running on the public internet, and its parts change every month. When nobody looks after it, it does not fail straight away — it fails a year later, usually when you need it most.

What happens to a site nobody looks after

Plugins go out of date and security holes turn up in the old versions. The site becomes a target for automated attacks — not because anyone is interested in it, but because bots try everything. The usual outcome is not a deleted site but planted links to other people’s pages, which nobody notices for months and which push search rankings down.

The second quiet thing is speed. Images pile up, plugins pile up, the database grows and the site gradually slows down. Nobody notices, because it happens a little at a time.

Why a backup on the hosting is not enough

Hosting usually does back up, only nobody counts on it until the moment they need it. That is when it turns out the backup is three days old, or that it sits on the same server that has the problem, or that it exists but nobody has ever tried whether the site can really be restored from it.

Backups are made off the hosting and the restore is tested rather than assumed. A backup nobody has ever tried to restore from is not a backup.

Updates are not done blind

Automatic updates sound good until one of them breaks something and the site goes down over the weekend. So the procedure is always the same: backup, update, check the key pages and forms. When something goes wrong, the site goes back one step, not one week.

What you should see of it

Once a month you get a summary: what was updated, whether there was any downtime, how speed is doing and what is recommended. Not a chart that says nothing, but a few sentences in plain language and a list of things to decide on.