Website maintenance.

What maintenance really is

The sentence “the website is finished” is true for exactly one day. After that the site starts to age without showing it: in the building blocks it is made of, security holes are found continuously — not while building, but months later, by somebody else. Such a hole is then published together with a description. From that day it is public knowledge, and automated programs sweep the entire internet looking for it.

Maintenance closes those holes before anyone finds them on your site. That is not an assurance that nothing will ever happen — it shrinks the window in which something can happen from months to days. Anyone who does not name that difference is selling a feeling rather than a service.

The outage nobody notices

The most expensive damage is rarely the visible kind. A site that stays blank is noticed within ten minutes. A contact form that stops sending after an update goes unnoticed for months — it reports no error, it dutifully shows the sender “Thank you for your message”, and nothing arrives in the inbox any more.

What you notice is this: things get quieter. And because nobody knows how many enquiries are missing, it gets blamed on the economy, the weather or the advertising. That is why the most important check is not the site itself but the path behind it: submit the form, follow the mail, confirm arrival.

What happens regularly

• Installing updates — system, extensions and building blocks kept current. One after another rather than all at once, so that in case of an error it is clear what caused it.
• Backup with a restore test — a backup that has never been restored is not a backup, it is a file. It gets restored as a trial run.
• Checking the form and mail path — send a test enquiry and verify it actually landed in the inbox.
• Uptime monitoring — the site is polled continuously. If it goes down, we find out, not your customer.
• Certificate and redirects — HTTPS valid, old addresses redirecting, no browser warning.
• Dead links and error pages — find references that lead nowhere and replace them before Google counts them.
• Loading time in view — measured rather than guessed, and reported when something gets noticeably slower.
• Data protection status — checking whether embedded services, legal notice and privacy policy still match up.

After every run you receive a short report. Not because it looks good, but because maintenance you never see is indistinguishable from maintenance that never happens.

What maintenance is not

It is not search engine optimisation and no substitute for new content. A maintained site does not rank higher — it just does not fall over. Nor is it a guarantee: anyone promising “all-round protection” for a small monthly fee is selling a word that nobody can honour.

And it is not what actually happens in many maintenance packages — an automatic update click that nobody ever verifies. If the form dies in the process, nobody notices, because nothing is being checked. The very part that can be skipped is the part that does the work.

Who is it for?

For businesses without their own IT department, where the website otherwise belongs to nobody — and so, in case of doubt, nobody looks inside. Especially for WordPress sites: they consist of many extensions and therefore have many places that age.

Also when the site is not ours. We look first at what it runs on and what condition it is in — only then do we talk about ongoing care. And if it turns out that a relaunch is worth more than maintaining the old one, we will tell you.

How it works with us

It starts with taking stock: where the site is hosted, what it is built with, what has not been updated for how long, whether backups exist at all. From that follows what needs doing regularly and at what interval — for a site with a shop that is different from five subpages.

After that it runs on a fixed schedule, with a report. You have a contact person with a phone number instead of a ticket system, and the price is agreed in advance. How we work in general is described on the process page.