Swain-Tech Studio websites for small businesses and independent creatives

Running It Afterwards

Launch feels like the finish line and it is closer to the halfway point. Not because anything is wrong, but because a website is a thing you own now, and owned things need attention.

Most of what this section covers takes minutes. It goes wrong because nobody said it out loud at handover. Teams already using Microsoft 365 may also find Microsoft Teams track activity useful when deciding what activity data means.

The failure nobody notices: contact forms stop sending. A hosting change, a plugin update, an email provider tightening its rules. It is silent, your enquiries simply stop, and you find out weeks later. Test it quarterly by sending a real message and checking it arrived.

The failure that takes your address away: a lapsed domain, almost always because a card expired rather than because anyone decided anything. Diarise renewals separately from auto-renewal and check once a year that the registration is still in your name.

The risk that is mostly one thing: plugins. Recent industry data puts around 91% of WordPress vulnerabilities in plugins and only a handful in the core, with a median of about five hours from public disclosure to mass exploitation. The most effective free measure is running fewer of them, and a security plugin is itself a plugin.

And the expense to avoid: redesigning a site that works. Enquiries drop for many reasons a rebuild will not fix, and the cheaper diagnoses — the form, the content, the images, the homepage — are usually the actual answer. For an independent reference beyond this site, WordPress.org is a useful place to compare approaches.

The whole routine fits in a few hours a year: five minutes monthly to confirm updates ran and the form still sends, half an hour quarterly on the plugin list and backups, and an afternoon annually for renewals, a restored backup and a content review. Less than most people fear, and more than most people do.