Why does a website break when nobody touches it?

A website does not stand on its own. It runs on a server that the hosting provider migrates to new software from time to time, it appears in browsers that update several times a year, and it is usually built from components that their makers keep developing. What works flawlessly today does not keep working on its own — the ground moves underneath it.

In this article I describe what breaks on a site left to itself, what the work I do under the name maintenance looks like, and when each arrangement is worth it.

What breaks on its own?

The most common faults do not start inside the site — they come from the environment changing. A few typical cases, the way the owner runs into them:

• The hosting switches to a new PHP version, and what remains in place of the site is a white screen — or an error message, in front of visitors.
• Two plugins clash after an update, and the contact form stops delivering messages. Visitors do not report this, they simply look elsewhere.
• The security certificate expires, and the browser shows a red warning instead of the page.
• The site gets hacked through a long-known security hole, and then sends spam or redirects to another site.
• Bots find the contact form, and machine-sent messages flood the inbox.

These are not rare, dramatic outages — they are slow wear. Most of it happens quietly, the owner notices weeks later, or not at all: the enquiries just dry up.

What does maintenance mean in practice?

Maintenance is four things for me: updates, backups, fixes and small changes. Updates keep the system and the plugins current before the gap turns into a fault. Backups exist so there is something to fall back on when a change does break something — without a backup, a fault can be final. Fixes and small changes are the everyday reality: a stuck form, a new price list, a photo to replace.

This does not mean daily attention. The owner writes when something is needed, and the background work runs on a schedule — in most months, unnoticed. Maintenance at its best is boring: it is the state where there is nothing to talk about.

When is a retainer worth it, and when is ad hoc enough?

The monthly arrangement is worth it where the site changes regularly, or where downtime is directly lost revenue — booking, payment or orders run on it. In that case maintenance is not an occasional repair but continuous oversight, and the monthly fee covers that readiness.

For a small, rarely changing brochure site, ad hoc work is defensible too: once or twice a year, an assessment, updates, a backup. The difference is that between those visits nobody is watching the site — that trade-off is worth making knowingly, not by accident.

Can a site built by someone else be taken over?

It can, and a large share of maintenance enquiries are exactly that: the site was built at some point, and its maker has since become unreachable, or the relationship ended. A takeover needs two things — access to the hosting and to the admin interface.

With me, a takeover starts with an assessment: I look at what runs under the site, what state its components are in, and I write down what I found. That is also where it turns out how much has been missed and what is urgent. After the assessment, the owner decides — and the write-up stays with them even if there is no follow-up.

How I do it in practice

For me, updating is not the “update all” button. A backup comes first, and after the update I walk through the site's key points — form, payment, booking, whatever matters on that particular site. If an update looks risky, I try it on a copy first. That order comes from experience: on a live site, even the smallest change can have consequences — one of my case studies describes what happened when that safety net was missing.

With backups, what counts is restorability, not the fact of the backup. It goes to a separate location, not onto the hosting it is meant to protect, and from time to time I test it — a backup is only worth anything if it can actually be restored.

What does this look like live? Among my projects, the case study about a holiday rental's website is the closest to this page: it is about what happened to a site in the years after handover.

Questions on this topic

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