The site went live, the launch post did its job, and everyone moved on to the next thing. Six weeks later a form stops sending, a plugin wants an update nobody understands, and the pricing page still shows last quarter's plans. None of it is urgent. All of it is costing you.
Launch is when the site's costs start.
A website is not a brochure you print once. It is software, running on a server, talking to a CRM, an analytics account and an email provider. Every one of those changes without asking you. The code under the site gets security fixes, the plugins get new versions, and the browser your buyers use gets updated every few weeks.
The words go stale too. You change your pricing, hire a head of sales, drop a feature, sharpen the line in your deck. The site only learns about it if somebody tells it.
So the real question after launch is not whether the site needs work. It is who does the work, and how you find out when they have not.
Running a site is four jobs.
Most founders picture "maintenance" as one vague chore. It is four separate jobs, and they fail in different ways.
- Hosting. A fast, secure server, a valid certificate, backups you can restore, and a caching layer so pages load quickly. This is infrastructure. You buy it, you don't build it.
- Updates. The CMS, its plugins and the server's language version all move on a schedule. Skip them and you trade a small, planned change for a large, unplanned one.
- Monitoring. Someone has to know the site is down, or that the contact form stopped delivering, before a buyer does. A form that fails quietly is the most expensive bug a startup site can have, because the only symptom is silence.
- Changes. New pages, new offers, new copy, a fixed headline. This is the job that actually moves your numbers, and it is the one that stalls first when nobody owns it.
Hosting and updates keep the site alive. Monitoring tells you when it isn't. Changes are why you have a site at all.
The founder is the wrong owner.
In most startups the site belongs, by default, to whoever built it or whoever last logged in. Usually that is a founder. It is the worst possible arrangement, for a plain reason: the founder's hour is the most expensive hour in the company, and site work always loses to a sales call.
The result is predictable. Updates wait until something breaks. Copy changes wait until a board meeting makes someone embarrassed. The site drifts from the company it describes, one small skipped change at a time.
The other default, the engineer who built the product, is barely better. Your engineers should be shipping the product. Every afternoon they spend on a plugin conflict is an afternoon your roadmap slips, and it is work they rarely enjoy or do well.
What to hand off, and what to keep.
Handing the site to someone else is not the same as giving it away. Hand off the work: the hosting, the updates, the monitoring and the queue of changes. Keep the assets in the company's name: the domain, the admin access, the analytics account and a current backup you can take elsewhere.
That split is the test for anyone you hire to run it. If they can't tell you where your backups are, who holds the domain and how you would leave, keep looking. A good arrangement is one you could end on a Friday without losing a page.
It also helps to be on a platform that makes the handoff easy. WordPress runs a large share of the web, which means any competent developer can pick up where the last one stopped. That is worth more to a startup than any feature in an editor demo.
What a good arrangement looks like.
One owner, named. A monthly allotment of changes, so the queue actually moves instead of waiting for a project. Monitoring that alerts a person, not an inbox nobody reads. Updates on a schedule, tested before they reach production. And a report you can read in two minutes: what changed, what broke, what was fixed.
That is what we do for the WordPress sites we run. Hosting covers the certificate, backups, caching and a CDN, continuous monitoring, ongoing maintenance and an hour of on-demand support each month. Website management adds monthly hours for page edits and revisions, so the site keeps up with the company instead of trailing it. It sits under Website, the third of the five things we do, and it works whether we built the site or someone else did.
If your site launched and then stopped moving, that is usually the cheapest problem in the company to fix. Five website mistakes startups make covers what to fix first.
Tell us what you're building.