Guide

The Website Maintenance Runbook

Optimization & Maintenance25 August 202616 pages

What you'll learn in this guide.

Most businesses do not have a maintenance problem, they have an ownership problem: nobody is accountable, so nothing is checked, and the first sign of trouble is a customer email. This runbook turns maintenance into a small number of named, scheduled, boring tasks across five categories — availability, security, performance, correctness and recoverability. It covers what should be monitoring without you, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual routines, an incident runbook with severity levels, an ownership table and a one-page maintenance calendar.

The seven monitors that should be running before any manual routine
A 20-minute weekly routine that catches most problems while they are still small
The monthly checks that find the quiet revenue loss — dead forms, stale content, drifting performance
Why the quarterly restore test is the single most valuable item on the calendar
The annual work that keeps a major version upgrade from becoming a rebuild
A one-page incident runbook, including what to do before you clean anything
Severity levels agreed in advance, so response is proportionate
An ownership table where every blank line is a failure nobody will notice

Inside the guide

Maintenance is a schedule, not a service
The five categories, and how each one fails
Continuous — what should be watching without you
Weekly — 20 minutes
Monthly — two hours
Quarterly — half a day
Annually — one day
The incident runbook and severity levels
Who owns what
The maintenance calendar on one page

What to check, how often, and who is accountable when it breaks — as a schedule you can copy straight into your tracker.

We'll send it to your email.

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