Haddington: who looks after your website now?

Haddington is East Lothian's county town, and its trade is different from the coast. Around the High Street and Court Street there are independent shops, cafes and pubs, but also solicitors, accountants, estate agents, vets and dentists. Further out, towards Gifford, Garvald and East Linton, there are farms, rural contractors, food and drink producers and holiday lets. I grew up in East Lothian, and Haddington has always been the town you went to for the serious business of life.

A lot of those businesses had a website built some years ago. It was done properly at the time. Then the person who built it moved on, retired, changed careers or simply stopped answering, and the site has been sitting there ever since.

The quiet problem with an old website

A website that nobody looks after rarely breaks all at once. It goes wrong slowly.

The opening hours drift out of date. A member of staff who left three years ago is still on the team page. The contact form stops sending emails, and nobody notices because nobody is getting any enquiries, which seems normal in a quiet month. The padlock in the address bar lapses, and visitors start seeing a "Not secure" warning.

The security updates pile up too, one every few weeks, until the site is running software with well-known weaknesses. And underneath all of it, the web address renews every year or two on somebody else's card. Until one year it does not.

What looking after a website actually involves

Year-round care is not glamorous, and it should not be expensive. For a typical Haddington business it covers a handful of things.

• Security updates. Keeping the site and everything it runs on up to date, so the known weaknesses are closed.
• Backups. A copy of the site kept somewhere else, and tested now and then to make sure it actually restores.
• Round-the-clock checks. Something that notices if the site goes down or the contact form stops working, and tells me before your customers do.
• The renewals. The web address and the padlock, renewed on time, in your name.
• Small changes. New opening hours, a new photo, a member of staff added or removed, done when you ask rather than in a month.
• A person to ring. Somebody local who built it or knows it, and picks up the phone.

That is most of it. The value is not in any single task. It is in somebody doing them all, every month, so that you never have to think about the site at all.

Taking over a site somebody else built

If your site was built by somebody who is no longer around, it can usually be taken over. The first job is always the same: find out who owns the web address.

That sounds trivial. It often is not. Plenty of web addresses are registered to the designer, or to a company that no longer exists, or to an email address nobody can open any more. Getting it moved into your name is the single most important thing you can do for an old website, because whoever owns the address controls your website and your email.

After that, I look at what the site is built on, whether it can be updated safely, and whether there is a working backup. Sometimes the answer is that the site is in good shape and just needs looking after. Sometimes it is so old that keeping it going costs more than replacing it. Either way you get a straight answer, in writing, before anything is spent.

Questions to ask whoever looks after it now

If somebody already looks after your site, or you pay a hosting company every year without being sure what for, ask them a few plain questions. Whose name is the web address registered in? When was the site last updated? Where is the backup kept, and when was it last tested? Who gets told if the site goes down?

A good answer to all four is a sign you are in safe hands, and you should stay put. Vague answers, or no answer at all, are the sign to get somebody to look properly.

Rural businesses have an extra reason

For the farms, holiday lets and rural contractors around Haddington there is an extra wrinkle: the mobile signal. A customer looking you up from a lane outside Gifford may have one bar, or none. An old site full of large photos and slow pages may simply never load for them.

Part of looking after a rural business site is keeping it light enough to load on a weak connection: smaller photos, fewer moving parts, the phone number and address near the top. It is a dull fix, and it often matters more than anything else on the list.

When it is fine to leave a site alone

Here is the unwelcome part. Not every business needs monthly care. If your site is a few simple pages built on one of the big page builders, which handle their own updates, and the information on it hardly ever changes, you do not need to pay anybody every month to look after it.

What you need instead is a check a couple of times a year. Does the site load on your phone? Is the padlock there? Are the hours and the phone number right? Does the contact form actually arrive in your inbox? Is the web address in your name, and when does it renew? You can do that yourself in twenty minutes, and if all the answers are yes, leave it alone.

Monthly care earns its keep when the site takes bookings or payments, changes often, holds customer details, or runs on software that needs regular security updates. If none of that applies, save the money.

Find out where you stand

If you run a business in Haddington or the villages around it and you are not sure who looks after your website now, that is a good reason for a conversation. There is more on Haddington businesses, and on what website management and maintenance includes and when you can skip it. The first look is free, and I am twenty five minutes along the A1: book a free consultation (opens in a new tab).