When a website fails dramatically, someone notices within the hour. The failures that actually cost organizations money are the quiet ones — the site looks fine, loads fine, and has not worked properly for four months.
The contact form that goes nowhere
This is the one we find most often. A mail setting changes, a plugin updates, a forwarding address is retired when someone leaves. The form still shows a success message. Submissions stop arriving. Nobody notices, because the absence of enquiries looks exactly like a quiet month.
Send yourself a test enquiry through your own website today. It takes two minutes and it is the highest-value check on this page.
The backup nobody has restored
An untested backup is not a backup — it is a file you hope is a backup. The only way to know is to restore it somewhere safe and look at the result. Organizations discover this at the worst possible moment.
What to check, and how often
- Monthly: submit a test enquiry through every form on the site
- Monthly: confirm software and dependency updates have been applied
- Quarterly: restore a backup somewhere safe and confirm it works
- Quarterly: check your SSL certificate expiry date
- Annually: confirm domain renewal and who controls the account
None of this is complicated. It just has to be somebody's job. The organizations that get caught out are almost never the ones who decided not to bother — they are the ones who assumed someone else was handling it.
Prolink Digital Network
Editorial
Written by the team who does the work at Prolink Digital Network. Articles come out of real projects rather than general advice.