Who looks after the website in August?

In June, the owner of a seasonal business stops opening the laptop. The boat goes out at eight, the last guests leave at midnight, and the website is left to look after itself until October.

It is also the website's busiest time of year. Every booking request, every enquiry from abroad, every late-night visitor deciding between you and the place next door arrives in the months when nobody is watching.

Most of the time, nothing goes wrong. When something does, it tends to be silent: the site still loads, but the form has stopped sending, or a warning page is scaring visitors away, and nobody finds out for weeks.

What usually breaks in summer

• The contact or booking form stops delivering. A changed email password, a full mailbox, a mail provider tightening its rules. The form still says "thank you". The message goes nowhere.
• The security certificate expires. Browsers show a full-page warning. Most visitors leave immediately.
• An update breaks something, or an update that was needed does not happen, and a known weakness in a plugin gets exploited.
• Hosting runs out of something — space, memory, a monthly limit — at the exact moment traffic peaks.
• The domain renewal fails because the card on file expired in the spring.

A plan for the months you are away

Do these in May, before the season, not in August:

1. Renew the domain for more than one year, and check the payment card on the hosting and domain accounts.
2. Check the certificate renews automatically. Most hosting does this now; confirm yours does.
3. Send a test enquiry every week. Set a calendar reminder. It takes one minute and catches the most expensive silent failure.
4. Decide who applies updates, and when. WordPress, its plugins and theme need regular security updates. Either someone does them on a fixed day, with a backup first, or they are on automatic updates for security releases only.
5. Have backups that are stored somewhere else, and restore one once, to prove it works.
6. Set up uptime monitoring that emails or messages you if the site goes down. Free services exist, and they notice before your customers do.
7. Write down who to call. The hosting login, the developer's number, the domain registrar. In one place, known to more than one person.

What "built to stay up" looks like

When we rebuilt the Mykonos Diving Center website, the point was that it would work in the middle of the season without anyone touching it: bookings confirmed by email in real time, each one passed to the centre's own system, and a performance score above 95 on phone and desktop. 45% of its bookings arrive outside office hours — exactly when nobody is watching.

For a very different kind of site, WeatherClub, a Greek weather forum with more than two hundred thousand posts, we moved it onto hosting that could carry its growth, and it has run at 99.98% uptime.

Mykonos Diving CenterA dive centre website that takes its own bookings

The honest version

Most small business websites do not need expensive maintenance contracts. They need the seven things above done once a year, and a weekly one-minute test. If you would rather not be the person who does them — especially in August — that is what a maintenance plan is for. Ask us about one.