What happens after your website goes live

Launch day gets all the attention, but it's a small part of a site's actual life. What happens in the months and years after is what determines whether the investment holds up or quietly decays.

The first few weeks

Real traffic surfaces things staging environments don't: an edge case in a form, a layout that behaves oddly on a device nobody tested, analytics that need a second look once actual visitor behavior starts coming in. We stay close to a site right after launch specifically to catch this early, rather than waiting for a support ticket.

Ongoing, unglamorous upkeep

Frameworks and server software get security patches, and applying them is routine work rather than something visible from the outside. Backups get taken and periodically tested, not just generated and left unopened. Performance gets rechecked as traffic and content grow, since the caching and image handling that worked at launch don't always hold up a year later without attention.

When it's time to add something

Most businesses come back at some point wanting more than the original site: a client portal, a booking system, an internal dashboard, an integration with a tool they've started relying on. Because the foundation is hand-coded rather than templated, that's usually an addition to the existing codebase, not a rebuild. That's the entire point of building it that way in the first place.

What the relationship actually looks like

You should be able to reach the people who built your site, not a support queue that starts from scratch every time. We stay involved after launch because a site that nobody maintains starts falling behind quietly, well before it becomes an obvious problem, and catching that early is a lot cheaper than fixing it after the fact.

More on how we structure ongoing work is on the investment plans page, and on how we approach builds generally on the about page.