An Old Site You Cannot Update Any More

How this happens

Gradually and without anybody deciding.

A site is built, works well, and needs no changes for a while.

The person who built it moves on. The system it was built in stops being updated. The login was in an email account nobody uses.

Three years later somebody wants to change an opening time and discovers there is no way to do it.

What to establish first

• Who owns the domain name, and can you access the account.
• Who the hosting is with, and who pays for it.
• What the site is built in.
• Whether there is a login, and who has it.
• Where the files actually are.
• Whether anything is backed up.

The first is the most important by a wide margin. A domain name registered to a former supplier is a genuine business risk, entirely separate from the website question.

The domain name specifically

Worth resolving before anything else, because it is the thing that cannot be rebuilt.

A website can be recreated. A domain name held by somebody unreachable cannot be, and losing it means losing the address on every van, every invoice and every search result.

Check who it is registered to, using any public lookup, and check that the contact email is one you control.

Where it is registered to a supplier, ask to have it transferred, which is a routine process and usually straightforward.

Where the supplier is unreachable, there are recovery processes and they are slow, which is a reason to check now rather than when it expires.

A worked example

A business whose site had been built in 2014 by somebody who had since retired.

The site worked, looked dated, and had not been changed in four years.

Investigating, the domain was registered to the retired builder, the hosting was paid by an annual charge on a card that had been reissued twice, and there was no login to anything.

The domain was the urgent problem, and transferring it took a fortnight and one helpful phone call.

The site itself turned out to be simple enough that the content could be copied out and rebuilt in a few days.

The lesson was that four years of nothing going wrong had disguised a situation where several things could have gone wrong badly.

Three options

Once you know what you have, the decision is between three.

Maintain it, which suits a site that works, is secure, and needs only occasional small changes somebody can make.

Migrate the content, taking the words and images into a current system while keeping the addresses, which suits a site with good content and an unworkable platform.

Rebuild, which suits a site whose content is out of date anyway and where starting again is less work than untangling.

Most businesses in this position assume the third and would be better served by the second, since the content is usually the expensive part and it already exists.

The security question

The reason this is urgent rather than merely annoying.

Software that is no longer updated accumulates known vulnerabilities, and those become publicly documented over time.

Which means an unmaintained site becomes progressively easier to compromise, and the most common outcome is not a dramatic attack but the site being quietly used to host something else.

That is discovered when a browser starts warning visitors, or when the search results show pages nobody wrote.

A site that cannot be updated is therefore on a clock, and how long it has depends on what it is built on.

The counter-case

Where leaving it alone is reasonable.

A plain site with no interactive parts and no login, built as simple pages, which has almost no attack surface and can sit for years safely.

A business genuinely winding down, where the site needs to survive eighteen months and then stop.

And a site that is not the business's main presence, where a listing does the work and the site is a formality.

Even in those cases, the domain and the hosting access still need resolving, since those are ownership questions rather than website ones.

What a rebuild actually costs

Worth estimating honestly before deciding, since the fear of the cost is what keeps sites in this state.

For a small business site of six or eight pages whose content already exists, a rebuild is days rather than months.

The expensive parts of a website project are deciding what it should say and producing photographs, and both of those already exist on the old site.

Which means migrating an existing site is frequently cheaper than the original build was, sometimes considerably.

The businesses that find it expensive are usually the ones treating it as an opportunity to redesign everything, which is a different project with a different cost.

Getting the content out

Simpler than most people expect, and worth doing whatever else is decided.

The words can be copied from the pages directly, which for a small site is an afternoon.

Images can be saved from the pages, though the versions on a site are usually reduced and the originals are better if they exist.

A list of every page address should be captured, since those need to keep working after any rebuild.

And it is worth taking a full copy of the site as it stands, using any of the free tools that download a whole site, so a working reference exists even if the original disappears.

Recording it this time

The step that prevents being here again in five years.

One document listing the domain registrar and login, the hosting provider and login, what the site is built on, who built it, and when anything renews.

Kept with your other business records rather than in an email account or somebody's head.

Which sounds obvious and is the single thing whose absence created this situation in the first place.

It is also what makes any future handover possible, whether to a new supplier, a partner, or somebody buying the business.

Twenty minutes to write, and it answers the questions that otherwise take a fortnight and a helpful phone call.

What to do

1. Look up who owns the domain.
2. Get it transferred if it is not you.
3. Find out who is paid for hosting, and when.
4. Take a full copy of the site.
5. List every page address.
6. Then decide between maintaining, migrating and rebuilding.

The first four are worth doing this week regardless of what gets decided afterwards, and together they amount to about a day of work.

None of the first four requires deciding anything about the website itself, which is why they are worth separating from the larger question.

What happens when an unmaintained site is compromised is covered in a site that got hacked and what happened next.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.