What happens to a website if nobody touches it for a year?
A website isn't furniture. It doesn't sit there the way it was left — while nobody touches it, everything around it moves.
This is the most common misunderstanding about websites, and an entirely reasonable one. When you pay for a site, you think of it as a one-off purchase: built, working, done. A shop sign behaves exactly like that.
A website, though, isn't an object but a service resting on several systems you don't control. It runs on a server that gets updated. In a language whose versions go out of support. It connects to mail, maps, payments, calendars — and each of those changes at its own pace, without telling you.
- your website — unchanged
- hosting
- language
- plugins
- outside service
all four move on by themselves — the site does not
What breaks visibly
The most visible failure is expiry. Domains and certificates renew annually, and if the notice goes to an old address — say, that of a developer you're no longer in touch with — then nobody learns about the expiry at all. For a domain this is the most expensive mistake a business can make: once released, the name is available to anyone.
The second is the version jump. Hosting providers periodically upgrade the language running on the server, because the old version stops receiving security fixes. The site can go down at that moment — not because someone broke something, but because the ground it stood on moved.
The third is the external connection. Maps, social feeds, newsletter sign-ups all depend on somebody else's service. If they change how access works, an error message or an empty box is left where the embed used to be. Visitors see this before the owner does.
What breaks quietly — and this is the dangerous kind
At least the failures above announce themselves. The harder case is when the site appears to work perfectly.
The most common of these is the contact form. A visitor fills it in, presses send, sees the thank-you message — and the e-mail never arrives. The usual cause is mail authentication: receiving providers tighten their rules while the sending configuration stays as it was, and the message lands silently in spam. Weeks can pass with nobody getting in touch, and the owner concludes there is no interest.
The second is the backup. Many hosts run automatic backups, and everyone takes comfort in their existence. A backup is only worth something, however, if someone has actually restored from it once. Until then it isn't a backup, just a file.
The third is stale content: opening hours, prices, staff, the list of services. Not a technical fault, yet this causes the most lost enquiries — because a visitor doesn't know the information is old, only that it doesn't add up.
The fourth is accumulation: automated sign-ups, unsolicited comments, old revisions of the text. None of these does harm on its own, but over years they inflate the database enough for the slowdown to become noticeable — without anyone having done anything at all.
What genuinely doesn't degrade
Not all of this applies to every site, and it's only fair to say so.
Static content doesn't degrade: text, images, structure. A hand-written site with no database and no plugins keeps working for years, because there is nothing in it that could move on its own. The domain and certificate still expire there too, but the list ends with that.
It follows that the need for maintenance doesn't come from the website, but from the number of moving parts inside it. A page that only shows text is a different order of magnitude from a booking-and-payment chain. Anyone claiming every website must be serviced monthly isn't looking at what they built.
What to do about it
The smallest thing that already helps a lot: put the expiry notices on your own address. Domain and hosting notices should arrive in a mailbox you open. That is a single setting, and it prevents the most expensive failure.
The second: send yourself a message through your own contact form once a month. Two minutes, and it catches exactly the fault that costs the most enquiries.
The rest — updates, backups, fixes, watching for version changes — is what a monthly arrangement is for; I write about that on the maintenance page. But the first two steps don't need me.
Questions on this topic
If I change nothing on the site, can it still degrade?
Yes, because it isn't the site that changes but its surroundings. Browsers update, the host switches PHP version, the services behind plugins get restructured. The site stays the same while everything beneath it moves — and that is what turns a previously flawless feature into a broken one.
How do I know whether my website has gone stale?
Four things are worth checking: when the domain and the certificate expire, whether every form and booking button still works, whether there is a recent backup, and when the last update was applied in the admin. If you can't answer two of these, the site isn't being looked after.
What does it cost if I have it fixed later instead?
More than looking after it continuously, because missed updates can't be caught up in one go. An update that jumps across many skipped versions frequently breaks the site, and debugging then means examining dozens of changes at once rather than one.
What genuinely needs no maintenance?
Static content: the text, the images, the structure. A hand-written site with no database and no plugins keeps working unchanged for years. The need for maintenance doesn't come from the website itself, but from how many moving parts were put into it.