A website does not break down, it goes out of date

When a site goes down you know within the hour: somebody calls. It is the only failure on this page that announces itself, and it is the rarest. Everything else degrades quietly — a certificate expiring, a form that stopped delivering, a page advertising opening hours abandoned two years ago.

These failures share one property: they produce no signal. The site displays, it looks well made, it appears to work. Visitors are the ones who find them, and they do not tell you — they leave, which is exactly the opposite of a noisy incident.

This article describes what to watch after launch, how often, and how to handle each category. The companion article covers speed, with its figures and its measurement protocol; none of that is repeated here.

It carries no chart because none of its claims concerns a quantity. It is an article about procedure, and its content fits into a checklist you can work through yourself.

This is the most expensive failure a brochure site can have, because it hits precisely the one place that produces customers. And it is the quietest: on the visitor side everything goes well, on the business side nothing happens, and nothing distinguishes it from a slow period.

The causes are nearly always outside the site. A change at the host, a spam filter that started classifying your own messages, a destination address that no longer exists, a sending service whose account went unpaid. The site is intact; the path after it is cut.

Checking is mechanical and takes two minutes: send yourself an enquiry through your own form, from a phone, off the office network. Do it on the first Monday of each month. It is the most profitable point on this page, and the one I would keep even if you did nothing else.

One extra protection costs little: have every submission leave a trace somewhere other than a message — a line in a sheet, a record somewhere. Then on the day the mail stops going out, the enquiries are not lost but merely waiting, and you find them.

Links break on their own, and this is the one category on this page where the business did nothing wrong. A partner site reorganises, a document moves, an online service changes its addresses, and your links to them stop working without anything on your side having moved.

There are two severities not to confuse. A broken outbound link is annoying but ordinary; the visitor goes back. A broken internal link — to your own contact page, your catalogue, your form — is a lost customer, and to the visitor it looks like an abandoned site.

Checking is done with any free tool that walks the site and lists what does not answer. Once a quarter is enough, and the first pass always turns up more than expected, which is normal and does not mean the site was badly built.

One case deserves particular treatment: pages you remove yourself. A page withdrawn without a redirect breaks every link others placed to it, including those in your own older publications. Redirecting to the nearest page costs a minute at the moment of removal and nothing afterwards.

This whole page fits into three rhythms, and a site held by those three will meet none of the failures described above. The value is in the brevity: a list of thirty points will not get done.

Every month, two actions of two minutes: send yourself an enquiry through the form from a phone off the office network, and open the home page on that same phone to check the facts that change — hours, phone, address.

Every quarter, two slightly longer checks: run a broken-link tool, and look at the four renewals from section two to see whether one is approaching. Twenty minutes, four times a year.

Every year, the half day in the next section. And one thing continuously, which takes no effort because it is automatic: monitoring that warns you if the site stops answering. It is the only point on this page where a tool replaces a look, precisely because it is the only noisy failure.

Our share is whatever needs technical access: monitoring that warns when the site stops answering, grouped updates with a verified backup taken first, redirects when a page disappears, one trial restore, and the access inventory. That fits in a modest contract, and it has to stay modest to be renewed.

We refuse to take on the monthly form check, and that is not us saving effort: the test only has value done from outside, on a phone, off your network — and by somebody who will notice an enquiry is missing. A supplier testing their own form from their own office reproduces the lie the neighbouring article describes for speed.

We also refuse to propose a rebuild in place of upkeep. An out-of-date site is not a badly designed site: it is a site nobody updated, and building it again produces exactly the same out-of-date site three years later for ten times the budget. A rebuild is justified on the signals in the neighbouring article, not on an impression of age.

Finally, the part that protects most needs no development and needs nothing from us: put the four renewal dates in a shared calendar with a reminder two months ahead, point their notices at a company address, and send yourself an enquiry through your form on the first Monday of every month. An hour today, two minutes a month afterwards.