A website is not a delivery. It is a running thing. The build is the part everyone plans for. The eleven months afterwards are the part that decides whether it still helps you next year.
What actually decays
- Contact details drift out of date and nobody notices
- Certificates and plugins expire, and browsers start warning visitors
- Forms quietly stop delivering, and you never learn what you missed
- Backups are assumed to exist until the day one is needed
None of these announce themselves. That is what makes them expensive.
The accountability problem
Most small businesses end up with the website from one supplier, the hosting from another, and the email from wherever was cheapest at the time. When something stops working, each one says the fault is on another side, and the owner becomes the person coordinating three companies that do not talk to each other.
That is not a technology problem. It is an ownership problem, and it is solved by having one number to call.
A short list worth running every quarter
- Open the site on a phone, on mobile data, and time how long it takes
- Send yourself a message through every form on the site
- Check the certificate is valid and not expiring within a month
- Confirm a backup exists, and that someone has actually restored one
- Read your own contact page as a stranger would
If nobody is responsible for the website, everybody assumes someone else is.
If you would rather that list was someone else's job, that is what ongoing support is for.
In short: launch is not the finish line. Decide who is responsible for the site before you need them, not on the day it breaks.