Website care, after the launch.
The work after launch: keeping a site fast, safe and up to date. The software under a site ages and its content goes stale, whether or not anyone is watching.
What the work includes
- Maintenance
- Updates to the software the site depends on, changes to content, and the small repairs every site needs.
- Performance
- Speed measured again and again on your real pages, and the cause of any slowdown found and removed.
- Security
- Security updates applied, access kept to the people who need it, and as few moving parts as the site can run on.
- Monitoring
- Checks that the site is up, that its forms still deliver, and that its security certificate and domain have not lapsed.
- Analytics
- Visits, searches and enquiries counted, and the numbers explained in plain words.
- Technical improvement
- One measured change at a time. Find the weakest thing, fix it, measure again.
- A written report
- What was done, what was found and what comes next, with dates.
Why a site needs care
A site is not finished on the day it launches. The software underneath it keeps changing: browsers, servers, the code libraries it depends on. Content goes out of date. New images and scripts are added, and a page that was fast becomes a slow one. None of this is visible from outside until something breaks.
Google watches two of these as well. It measures speed from real visits, in the three figures it calls Core Web Vitals, so a site has to stay fast and not only launch fast. And when it finds that a site has been hacked, the pages can appear with a warning in search results, or behind a warning screen in the browser.
How the work goes
- Watch. Automated checks that the site answers, that its forms deliver and that nothing has expired. We also read what Search Console reports.
- Update. Security updates first, then the rest.
- Measure. Speed on your real pages, on a phone. Visits, searches and enquiries from the site’s analytics. The same measurement each time, with dates, so one period can be compared with the last.
- Improve. One change at a time. The weakest thing is found, fixed and measured again.
- Report. What was done, what was found, what comes next. What was not measured is written down as not measured.
What keeps the work small
How a site is built decides how much care it needs. A site made of finished pages, with little software running behind it, has less to update and less that can be attacked. That is one reason we build static first. A site with a great deal of software behind it needs more attention, and it is better to know that at the start.
Where to start
Care starts from knowing what state the site is in. For a site we did not build, we begin by reading it, in the way described under technical SEO. Sometimes the honest finding is that rebuilding would cost less than repairing; then website redesign is the page to read. Either way, tell us what the site is and what worries you about it.
What we will not promise
- A site that never goes down. Servers fail and software has faults. The work is to find out early, fix the cause and say what happened.
- A site that cannot be broken into. No one can promise that. Updates and fewer moving parts lower the risk.
- Growth on its own. Care keeps a site healthy. New visitors come from the content and the SEO work built on top of it.
Goes with
- Technical SEO The part of SEO nobody sees: whether a search engine can reach your pages, render them, and understand how they fit together. If it cannot, nothing else you do for search will count.
- SEO The work that lets the right people find what you already do well. It has an order: a site that can be read, then pages that answer the question, then a reputation that is earned.
- Web development Company websites, landing pages, online stores and web applications. Design, content, search and speed are decided together here, because on a finished page they cannot be separated.
- Case study: LARAS A company site for Laras, an AI and automation studio: original 3D scenes, one honest simulation, and a home page that loads in fifteen requests.