What actually breaks on a website in its first year
Agencies sell the launch. The quiet part — the twelve months after — is where the failures actually happen. Here is the real list, from someone who cleans them up.
A website is not a poster you print once. It is software connected to other people’s software — a host, a domain registrar, a payment gateway, a dozen plugins — and all of it keeps moving after you launch. Here is what actually goes wrong in the first year, roughly in the order we see it.
1. The SSL certificate expires
Most certificates last 90 days and auto-renew — until the renewal quietly fails. Then every visitor gets a full-page “Not secure” warning before they see a word of your site. For a business taking enquiries or payments, that is a hard stop, and it is invisible to you unless you are watching for it.
2. The contact or booking form stops sending
Forms break silently. A plugin updates, a mail setting changes, the sending service tightens its rules — and suddenly enquiries stop arriving and no error is shown. The page still looks fine. You just notice, weeks later, that it has been quiet. This is the single most expensive failure on this list because you cannot see it happening.
3. A plugin update takes the site down
On a typical WordPress site, ten to thirty plugins each update on their own schedule. Now and then two of them disagree and a page — or the whole site — white-screens. The fix is usually quick if someone notices within the hour. If nobody is watching, it can sit broken for days.
4. The payment or WhatsApp link dies
Payment gateways rotate keys and change APIs. WhatsApp business numbers get reconnected. Either way, the button still looks clickable — it just goes nowhere. Every tap on a dead checkout is a customer who tried to pay you and could not.
5. Speed rots
Sites get slower over the year as content, images and tracking scripts pile up. Nobody adds the slowness on purpose; it accumulates. On a mid-range phone on mobile data — what most of your customers are actually holding — a site that was fast at launch can become a three-second wait by month eight.
6. Search rankings drift
Google changes constantly, competitors publish, and a site nobody touches slides down. Not dramatically — just a steady drift that you only notice when the enquiries thin out.
Why the handover is the dangerous moment
Every failure above happens after the site is delivered — which is exactly when most agencies have moved on. The build is the loud, visible three weeks. The twelve months of quiet upkeep is the part that actually determines whether the site keeps earning, and it is the part most people are not paying anyone to do.
That is the whole reason BuildVaillant contracts for the year up front. We build the site, then stay on watch for 365 days under a written contract — monitoring, patches, backups, fixes and a named human — so the list above gets caught in hours instead of discovered in month eight. Here is what that covers.
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