What Makes a Website Easy to Maintain After Launch

In the common view, the most important aspect of web development is development itself. In reality, maintenance is, at the very least, as important as development. Apart from obvious tasks, such as adding content, one must consider software updates, server costs, and ensuring site stability during a large influx of new users. Many businesses that create websites in the hope of expanding their outreach to potential customers often find that they have to dedicate substantial sums to site maintenance after deployment. By not considering maintenance, they not only exceed their budgets but also create additional pressure on themselves by choosing technologies that do not fit their use cases. Often, these mistakes can make an unoptimized site a net loss for a company. In this article, we will discuss how to avoid those pitfalls and ensure that your site is easy to maintain after launch.

Step 1. Understanding Your Goals

Most problems with difficult-to-maintain sites (both financially and technologically) have to do with the lack of strategic vision. In our opinion, all businesses can benefit from having a site today: the Internet is now the main source of communication across the globe. However, the scope and complexity of those sites will obviously differ depending on a particular use case. A large international retail chain will likely need a complex solution with multiple custom page types and unique landings. A small retail store selling niche products in one city or even one location can get great results from one high-quality landing page, outsourcing marketplace functions to third-party services like Shopify. Your goals will obviously define the choice of technology too. Some companies will benefit from a Webflow development service or a similar no-code solution, and others may need complex software combining JavaScript and Python. In short, you need to answer the following questions before development: Why do I need to have a site in the first place? What scope will be optimal for my industry? How many resources can I direct to this site?

Step 2. Understanding Key Variables for Development and Maintenance

Once you have a good understanding of your goals, it should not be difficult to define the key variables for development and maintenance.

For development, these variables (our list is not exhaustive) can involve speed, team size, and how complex various site functions are. If your field is in a constant state of change, speed is often the most important aspect: the faster you create a site, the earlier you will start to attract new customers. Smartphone manufacturing or premium food production are good examples of such fields. New products arise in them constantly due to a high rate of innovation, requiring constant innovations in Internet marketing, too. Businesses that work in fields with a slower pace of innovation may focus on complex functions and a lower development speed, working with a smaller team and using technologies that require more expertise for development but offer better flexibility for future maintenance.

For maintenance, the main variables are the cost of day-to-day functioning and the difficulty of developing new functions. Day-to-day functioning includes server costs, necessary refactoring for security updates, and content creation. As for the difficulty of developing new functions, it involves the ability to adapt to a sudden rise in user counts and create site pages with new experimental designs. Ten years ago, the general rule here was quite simple: fast development with low costs usually meant difficulties with maintenance in the future and vice versa. Today, this tendency is mostly outdated and is usually relevant only for the most complex and large projects. In the next section, we will discuss some technological options that enable businesses to benefit from both fast development and easy maintenance.

Step 3. Choosing the Right Technologies

Two technologies enable website developers to create sites fast and without any future maintenance problems. Firstly, we are currently seeing the rise of no-code and low-code technologies into the mainstream. Benefitting from increased software engineering expertise and improved hardware capabilities, this technology allows experts to create sites without using any code or using only a minimum amount of coding. Platforms like Webflow or Bubble offer intuitive UIs to their users, allowing them to create sites in visual editors.

One of the main difficulties in traditional web development is the need to describe various visual page properties via scripting languages. In order to change block sizes or their colors, developers have to write corresponding code and then input the right variables in a numerical format. This code-based editing is tedious and often requires trial-and-error modifications for tasks that are extremely simple (like resizing some text blocks or adding images to them). No-code removes this problem once and for all by allowing developers to mostly rely on pre-made visual blocks that they can edit in a UI similar to Figma or Photoshop. More importantly, platforms like Webflow or Bubble also simplify maintenance by including site hosting and security services in their subscriptions.

Secondly, we are also seeing the rise of AI these days. While AI is certainly incapable of developing sites all on its own at this stage, it is great at automating many tedious tasks, helping create boilerplate code or high-quality automated tests. In combination with no-code, this technology can greatly speed up development by removing one of the main weaknesses of the technology: its reliance on pre-made blocks. AI can code custom blocks for developers, allowing them to add unique functions to sites without interrupting their workflow for long. While AI code often needs editing, it is much easier to introduce modifications manually than write everything from scratch.

As for the more traditional development tools (for example, Python or Java), they undoubtedly continue to stay relevant today for very complex sites. If you need to integrate complex animations, dozens of page types, and unique functions (for example, custom video or audio players), these traditional instruments are usually more efficient because they enable fine-tuning. However, not every business needs something that complex: no-code solutions are perfect for creating reliable and easy-to-maintain sites for these cases.

Conclusion

To summarize, websites become easy to maintain when you take three aspects into consideration: your goals, various variables like development speed, and current technologies. The main problem with these aspects is that experts outside web development often don’t know how to properly define them. As a result, the best option is to address expert companies like Keenethics. By leveraging expert knowledge, you will be able to avoid the majority of the pitfalls affecting web development today.