Website maintenance that catches quiet failures
Forms, checkout and search checked every week, so a quiet failure never looks like a slow month.
Is your website being looked after?
Eight questions. It names the one thing most likely to hurt you, and what to do about it today.
Has anyone filled in your own contact form and checked the email arrived, in the last month?
Would you get an alert if the site went down, or would a customer tell you?
Is the domain in your company name, with renewal notices going to an address someone reads?
Has a backup been restored, anywhere, in the last year?
Is the software behind the site patched on a schedule?
Is anyone watching whether the certificate renews?
If whoever built it vanished tomorrow, do you hold the logins?
Has anyone used the site on a phone in the last three months?
The answer
Answer the eight
Unattended, out of eight
Do this today
Show everything unattended
A second pair of eyes
Want someone to check the ones you are not sure about?
We reply within one business day.
Then: The same question about access rather than uptime: who still has a login →
Saved in this browser, nowhere else. See all your answers together · All twenty-five tools
Almost nothing that goes wrong with a website announces itself. The page still loads, so nobody looks. A form that stopped delivering, a lapsed certificate, a year of missed patches, a renewal notice sent to somebody who left. Maintenance is checking those, and proving the backup restores.
Is it a fit?
Quiet
Sites fail silently. The form stops sending and nobody finds out for a month.
Proof
You can show who owns the domain and where the backup is, today, without asking anyone.
Expiry
Certificates, domains and licenses have dates, and somebody is watching them.
What you get
The things that fail silently
Your own form filled in and sent every month, by us, checking the email arrives.
Certificates and domains, watched
Since 15 March 2026 a TLS certificate can last at most 200 days.
Updates, on a copy first
Patched on a schedule, tested on a copy, with a way back.
A backup you have restored
An untested backup is a hope.
Why nobody notices
Because the home page still loads. Every check a business owner naturally makes is a check that the site is up, and up is the one thing that rarely goes wrong. What goes wrong is one step inside: the form posts and returns a thank you and sends nothing, the payment page throws on one card type, the booking calendar stops syncing. All of it looks perfectly healthy from the outside, which is exactly why it can run for months.
Then there is the domain, which is the only failure on this page that can end a business rather than dent it. It is worth knowing, today, whose name the domain is registered in and which inbox the renewal notice lands in. A surprising number of companies find out that both answers are a developer they stopped working with in 2021, and they find out in the week the domain expires.
Maintenance covers the platform. Changing the words is a content system your team can use. Where a site is past maintaining, a redesign is the right answer instead.
Questions we get
Our site is fine. Do we need this?
Possibly not. Worth spending two minutes on the checker above before deciding, because the question is not whether the site is up.
The question is whether anyone would know if the contact form stopped delivering tomorrow. If the right answer is that you would work it out from a quiet fortnight, that is the gap, and it is the same gap on a beautiful site as on an ugly one.
Can you maintain a site somebody else built?
Yes, and it is most of this work. We start by finding out what it is built on, which is occasionally a surprise to everyone.
The first pass is an inventory: platform, plugins, hosting, domain, DNS, certificates, and who holds each login. That inventory is worth having even if nothing else happens, and you keep it either way.
What if we do not have the logins?
Common, and recoverable more often than people expect. Domain ownership is provable, hosting accounts have recovery paths, and registrars have a process for exactly this.
It is much cheaper to sort out on a calm Tuesday than during an outage, which is when almost everybody discovers the problem.
How often does anything need doing?
Monthly for the checks that matter, and immediately for a security fix that is being actively exploited.
Certificates used to be annual and are now roughly twice a year, heading toward every seven weeks by 2029. That change alone has moved a lot of sites from something you could ignore into something that needs a routine.
More in the guides and every answer in one place.
Read next
What breaks quietly, who has access to fix it, and whether the platform under it is still the right one.
Shaheer leads the work, with engineers, writers, filers and analysts behind him. C-suite operations for a San Francisco AI company, Six Sigma on the process side, Anthropic certified on the Model Context Protocol, ten years across eight industries. See what we have built