Your Site Is Live. Now What?

Launching a website feels like crossing a finish line. It isn't. It's the point where a site stops being a project and starts being an asset — and assets need tending or they quietly lose value.

Here's what the first month should look like, and what the rhythm is after that. None of this requires technical skill.

Week One: Make Sure It's Findable and Working

Submit your site to Google. A new site can take weeks to be discovered on its own. Create a free Google Search Console account, verify your site, and submit your sitemap. This is the single highest-value hour in this entire list.

Check your Google Business Profile matches. Same business name, same phone, same address, same hours as the site. Google cross-references these, and mismatches hurt your local ranking. If you don't have a profile yet, start there — it matters more than the site for local search.

Test every form yourself. Fill out your own contact form. Did the email arrive? Did it land in spam? Did it come from an address you can reply to? Broken contact forms are the most expensive bug on the internet, and they fail silently — you don't get a complaint, you just get nothing.

Open it on your own phone. Not the developer's phone. Yours, on cellular, not wifi. Tap the phone number — does it dial? Tap the address — does it open Maps?

Ask three people to look at it. Not colleagues. Actual customers if you can. Ask them one question: "what do we do, and how would you get in touch?" If they hesitate, your homepage isn't clear yet.

Weeks Two to Four: Give It Something to Rank For

Put the address everywhere. Email signature, business cards, invoices, vehicle, storefront, every social profile, your Instagram bio. A website nobody links to is a website nobody finds.

Ask for reviews. Five recent, honest reviews on your Google profile will influence more buying decisions this quarter than any design change. Ask customers you've just made happy — that's the only good moment.

Check what people are searching. Search Console starts showing real queries within a couple of weeks. You'll usually find at least one surprise: a service people want that you barely mention, or a term you'd never have thought of. Adjust your wording to match how customers actually talk.

Fix the top thing people miss. Watch where the questions come from. If three people call to ask something the site should have answered, the site is missing it. Add it.

The Monthly Rhythm

Fifteen minutes a month covers most of it:

• Confirm the site loads and the contact form still delivers. Things break without anyone touching them — expired certificates, plugin conflicts, hosting changes.
• Check hours and prices are current. Especially after holidays. Wrong hours on a website is worse than no website.
• Add one thing. A new photo, a completed job, a short update. Search engines favor sites that show signs of life, and so do customers.
• Glance at your traffic. Not to obsess — just to notice if something dropped to zero, which is usually a sign of a technical problem rather than a marketing one.

The Part That Isn't Optional

Behind the scenes, a live site needs maintenance whether or not anyone touches the content:

• Security updates. The software running your site gets patched regularly, and unpatched sites are found by automated scanners, not people. Most hacked small business sites weren't targeted — they were simply reachable.
• Backups that actually restore. Not just running. Restoring. Here's a 20-minute test.
• SSL certificate renewal. If it lapses, browsers show visitors a full-page security warning. That's an instant loss of every visitor that day.
• Domain renewal. Set it to auto-renew with a card that isn't about to expire. Businesses lose their domains this way every single day, and recovering one is expensive when it's recoverable at all.
• Uptime monitoring. Knowing your site is down before a customer tells you. I wrote about what that downtime costs in The Real Cost of Downtime.

None of this is dramatic. All of it is the difference between a site that works in three years and one that quietly stopped working eight months ago and nobody noticed.

If You'd Rather Not Think About It

That's a completely reasonable position — you have a business to run, and none of the above is why you started it. That's what a care plan covers: hosting, updates, backups, monitoring, certificate and domain renewals, and small content changes, handled without you tracking any of it. Here's what mine covers.

The honest version of the pitch is that you're paying to never think about this list again, and to have someone to call rather than a support queue.

The Short Version

First week: get found, test everything, fix what's confusing. First month: link to it everywhere, collect reviews, adjust to what people actually search. After that: fifteen minutes a month, and make sure someone is handling the maintenance — you or somebody you pay.

A website isn't furniture. It's closer to a vehicle: it works well for years with basic upkeep, and becomes expensive the moment you ignore it.

Just launched, or sitting on a site nobody's touched in years? Tell me where things stand and I'll tell you what actually needs doing — and what doesn't.