Stability

Every self-catering website sits on a stack of infrastructure — the domain, DNS, SSL, hosting, backups, integrations — each set up a particular way, at a particular point in time. When the site loads and bookings are coming in, the configuration underneath rarely crosses anyone's mind. But platforms update, plugins age, security threats evolve, and without regular attention things drift in ways that aren't obvious until something breaks.

A self-catering website also carries reputational weight. It's the public face of a business that trades on trust, recommendation, and a name built up over years. When something goes wrong on a site — a security warning in Google, an SSL certificate that's quietly expired, a contact form pumping out spam, a hacked page injecting links no one can see from the front end — the damage isn't just technical. It's the erosion of the thing the site exists to protect. Stability work is, in the end, reputation work. The site stays up, stays clean, stays trusted, and nothing on it ever embarrasses you or undermines what you've built.

We start with an audit — a thorough, honest assessment of the state of things. How's the hosting, who owns and controls the domain, are there backups and has anyone tested them. How fast does the site load on a phone in the mountains. Is analytics set up properly. Who still has login access from three years ago. The specifics depend on the platform — WordPress has its own maintenance demands, Squarespace and Duda have different ones — but the fundamentals are universal.

The audit produces a remediation plan. What's a now job, what can wait. The goal is to get the site to a known-good baseline — current, secure, performing properly, backed up, and monitored. For some sites that's a few hours. For others it's a couple of days. It's a defined piece of work with a clear outcome.

Then it's about staying there. A monthly maintenance plan — proactive, not reactive. Updates, monitoring, backup verification, performance tracking, security checks. The plan is flexible, it can for example include an SLA for response times and a small allocation of hours for the inevitable: a broken widget after a platform update, a page accidentally deleted, something that just needs someone to sort it, and quickly.

As part of this we often serve as the technical contact point for the site — the address that receives the registrar notices, the security alerts, the platform warnings, the "action required" emails that would otherwise land in your inbox and either alarm you or get lost. We triage them, action what needs actioning, and come to you with the things that genuinely need a decision.

A site that's fast, secure, and gathering good data is ready for Visibility and Agility work — the firm foundation that everything builds on.