Do you know who looks after your website?

Ask a business owner who looks after their website and you'll often get a pause. The person who built it moved on. The agency was wound up. A nephew set it up and is now at university. Or it was always "the hosting company", and nobody is quite sure what that covers.

Through our agency partners we hear the same thing again and again: lots of businesses don't have a developer looking after their site, and many would rather not have to think about one at all. That's a perfectly reasonable position, right up until something needs doing.

Websites don't stay finished. The software they run on is updated constantly, often for security reasons. In October, for example, two serious flaws in PHP, the language most WordPress and WooCommerce sites run on, were patched in a hurry after details leaked early. Sites with someone looking after them were updated within hours. Sites without anyone looking after them are still waiting, and their owners probably don't know.

Five questions worth answering

1. Who holds the domain? Is it registered in the business's name, on an account you can log in to? If the registration lapses, your site and your email go with it.
2. Who holds the hosting? Whose card pays for it, and could you get into the account tomorrow if you had to?
3. Who applies updates? To the CMS, the plugins and the server underneath. "It updates itself" is sometimes true and often only partly true.
4. Where are the backups, and has anyone ever restored one? A backup nobody has tested is a hope, not a backup.
5. Who do you call when it breaks? Not who you'd try. Who would actually pick up.

If you can answer all five, you're in better shape than most. If you can't, you're not alone, and it's usually straightforward to fix.

What we do about it

We start with a health check. We find out what the site runs on, how out of date it is, who holds each account, and whether the backups work. You get a short, plain-English report: what's fine, what needs attention now, and what can wait. If you'd like someone to look after it from then on, we can do that. If you'd rather keep it in-house, the report tells you what to keep an eye on.

If the developer has already gone and you're locked out of parts of it, our guide on taking back a WordPress site when your developer has gone covers how that recovery works, and our software rescue work covers the bigger cases.

A website health check is £250 + VAT. Not sure who looks after your website? Book a health check.