Web & Maintenance

They haven’t logged into their own website in a year. The person who built it stopped answering emails a while ago. And they’re a little afraid to click anything in there in case it breaks.

People will write a five-paragraph review torching their hosting company. Hidden charges, support that hung up on them, the works. What they won’t say out loud is the quieter thing underneath it — the one at the top of this page.

I’d bet it’s more common than every hacking headline combined. It just isn’t the kind of thing you post about, because it feels like admitting you dropped the ball on your own business.

I read someone describe this perfectly once. He said his website problem had nothing to do with viruses or hackers. The problem was inertia. He’d known for a long time that he needed to deal with it, he just wasn’t sure how to go about it, and he was a little embarrassed to ask. So he didn’t. For years.

Then he finally called his host and found out the platform he’d signed up for a decade earlier was flat-out obsolete. The whole thing needed to be moved before it stopped working — and he’d been carrying that low hum of dread the entire time, for years, over something that turned out to be a manageable afternoon of work once somebody who knew the terrain just handled it.

Here’s the part that actually isn’t your fault. A website is the one thing you bought that was supposed to be “done.” You paid someone, they built it, it went live, everybody moved on. Nobody handed you a manual that said: by the way, this needs an oil change every few months for the rest of its life, and the guy who built it isn’t planning to do them.

So it sits. And the longer it sits, the more touching it feels like defusing something — which makes you want to touch it even less. That’s not negligence. That’s a completely rational response to a thing nobody ever explained.

The other reason people freeze is they’ve been burned by the upsell. You call somebody because you want your hours of operation changed — a thirty-second edit — and instead of doing it, they tell you the whole site is too slow and outdated and really you need a full rebuild.

Now a small ask has turned into a sales pitch and a five-figure number, so you hang up and decide you’ll deal with it later. Later becomes never. I get why. That move is everywhere, and it’s exhausting.

That’s most of the job. Run the updates carefully so they don’t take the site down. Keep a real backup somewhere that isn’t the same server. Retire the plugins that have quietly turned into junk. And when you email me because you need the hours changed, or a new staff photo up, or a typo fixed before a customer sees it — I just do it. I don’t use it as an opening to sell you something bigger. You’ll go whole months without hearing from me, and that’s the version where it’s working.

If you’ve been avoiding your site, there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Send me the address. I’ll look at it and tell you honestly where it stands — whether it’s in better shape than you feared, or whether something genuinely needs attention. Either way you’ll know, and knowing is a lot lighter to carry than the not-knowing.