Why a website seizes up when nobody looks after it for two years

Most of the sites that come to us with a problem were not badly built. They simply have not been touched for two years. That sounds harmless, because the site still works. Yet that is exactly the moment it starts getting expensive.

What happens in those two years

WordPress itself gets an update a few times a year. Your theme gets one. And every plug-in you use gets one too, sometimes monthly. Every update assumes the previous one has been installed. Skip twenty of them and you can no longer catch up one at a time.

Meanwhile your hosting moves to a newer version of PHP, the language WordPress is written in. That often happens automatically and without warning. A plug-in that has not been maintained for three years stops working after that. Sometimes you see it straight away, sometimes only on one page you rarely look at.

And known security holes are made public. That is not dangerous as long as you update, because the fix appears at the same time as the announcement. It only becomes dangerous if you do not install it, because then there is a manual online describing what is open on your site.

The real problem is not the technology

What we find most often on a site like that is not a broken plug-in. It is that nobody dares to touch anything any more.

There is a notice about updates. Someone once pressed the button, the site looked odd afterwards, and the notice has been sitting there ever since. With every next update the threshold gets higher, because there are now fifteen waiting instead of one and nobody knows which one caused the trouble.

That is how you end up with a site that still works but that nobody goes near. That is a worse position than a site that is broken, because a broken site is something you fix.

Catching up costs more than keeping up

Keeping up is dull work. Update once a month, then check that the main pages and the form still work. That is half an hour.

Catching up is something else. First you have to work out what is running, what is overdue and what no longer exists. Plug-ins that have been discontinued need replacing with something else, and that something else works just differently enough. Count on days instead of hours.

That is why, with a neglected site, we always start by clearing up before we switch maintenance on. Otherwise you are mainly maintaining problems.

What you can check yourself

Look in your admin area under Updates. Is the number above ten, then you are behind. Then look under Plug-ins to see when each one was last updated. If a plug-in has not had an update for over a year, there is a good chance the maker has stopped.

Then fill in your own contact form. That is the part that most often breaks silently, and you only notice when you start wondering why nobody replies any more.

Read what we mean by website maintenance, and what happens every month.