The Care and Feeding of Your Website: What Happens After Launch?

Launching a new website feels like crossing a finish line.

The site is live. The redirects work. The forms submit. Everyone has signed off. You can finally stop talking about navigation menus and website content, yipee!

Except, of course, your website isn’t finished.

A website is a living thing. People add pages, upload images, install plugins, create forms, publish events and make tiny design decisions that accumulate over time. Without some ongoing care and feeding, even a beautifully built website can slowly become cluttered, inconsistent, inaccessible, slow or insecure.

We asked the ArcStone team what website owners should be paying attention to after launch. They had thoughts. Lots of them.

Here are some of the big ones.

1. Stop uploading gigantic images

This came up more than once, which tells you something.

Modern phones and cameras produce enormous images. Your website generally does not need them.

Uploading a 6 MB camera-original PNG when a properly sized, compressed image would do the job adds unnecessary weight to your pages. Do it repeatedly, and your once-speedy website starts feeling sluggish.

Before uploading an image:

• Resize it to approximately the dimensions you actually need.
• Compress it.
• Choose the appropriate file format.
• Avoid uploading images directly from your phone or camera at full resolution.

And while you’re there, add alt text. It’s good for accessibility, SEO and AI visibility. 

2. Accessibility is an ongoing practice, not a launch-day task

A website can be accessible when it launches and gradually become less accessible as people add new content.

Two of the easiest ways this happens are images and headings.

Write useful alt text. Alt text should briefly communicate the purpose or relevant content of an image to someone who can’t see it. Don’t skip it, and don’t stuff it with keywords.

Use real headings, and use them in order. Don’t make regular paragraph text big and bold because you want it to look like a heading. And don’t pick H4 because you like its appearance better than H2.

Your heading structure should communicate the organization of the page:

• H1: The primary page title
• H2: Major sections
• H3: Subsections within an H2
• H4–H6: Additional levels when genuinely needed

Heading hierarchy helps screen-reader users navigate a page and gives search engines useful information about how your content is organized.

If you don’t like how an H2 looks, change the H2 style. Don’t change the semantic structure of your content to solve a design problem.

3. Your website is not a storage closet

Here’s a surprisingly common website lifecycle:

Someone uploads a PDF. They link to it from a page. Three years later, they remove the link.

The PDF stays in the Media Library forever.

Or someone starts using the website to store meeting packets, internal documents and miscellaneous files because, well, there’s an upload button.

Over time, the website becomes a file-sharing system nobody intended to create.

When you remove an obsolete document or image from your content, consider whether the underlying file should be removed too. And if something isn’t really web content in the first place, ask whether it belongs on the website at all.

Google Drive exists for a reason.

4. You are allowed to delete things

Yes, really.

You don’t need 542 pages of old news releases to prove that your organization has been busy.

You probably don’t need an event page announcing a breakfast that happened in 2011 either. Nobody is coming.

Websites naturally accumulate content over time, but more content doesn’t necessarily mean more value. Outdated or low-value pages can clutter search results, confuse visitors, and make your site harder to maintain. Google also doesn’t have unlimited time or resources to crawl every page on your site, so be intentional about what you keep, update, consolidate, or remove. Focus Google’s attention and your visitors’ on the content that matters most.

Periodically review:

• Old news and blog posts
• Past events
• Expired campaigns
• Outdated staff pages
• Old landing pages
• Draft pages that were never published
• Documents nobody needs anymore

Some content should be updated. Some should be redirected. Some should be archived.

And some should simply disappear.

5. Resist the urge to install another plugin

Need a feature?

There’s a plugin for that.

Need another feature?

There’s another plugin for that.

Do this enough times and eventually your WordPress dashboard starts looking like a software junk drawer.

Plugins aren’t inherently bad. We use plenty of vetted and tested plugins. But every plugin introduces code, maintenance requirements, potential compatibility issues and, in some cases, security risk.

Before installing one, ask:

Do we actually need this? Is the plugin actively maintained and reputable? Can our existing tools already accomplish this? Who is going to maintain it?

And please don’t install three plugins that all do approximately the same thing.

6. Update your software

This isn’t exciting, but it’s important.

Your CMS, theme, plugins and integrations need regular updates. Updates often contain security patches, compatibility fixes and performance improvements.

The important word, though, is regularly—not recklessly.

For significant updates, use a staging environment or test page whenever possible. Better yet, have your digital agency handle more complex upgrades. And after any update, don’t assume everything is fine: check your forms, navigation, integrations, and other important functionality to make sure everything still works as expected.

Which brings us to…

7. Test your forms. Seriously.

A contact form can look perfectly normal while quietly failing in the background.

That’s a particularly unpleasant way to discover you’ve missed three months of inquiries.

Build form testing into your regular maintenance process. For important lead-generation, donation, registration or contact forms, consider testing them weekly.

Submit the form yourself.

Did you receive the confirmation? Did the notification reach the right person? Did the submission appear where it’s supposed to?

Five minutes of testing can prevent a very expensive problem.

8. Don’t duplicate everything

Need this year’s donation form?

You probably don’t need to create:

2025 Donation Form
2026 Donation Form
2027 Donation Form

…just so you know when someone donated.

Your form system already records the submission date.

Before duplicating pages, forms, templates or other site elements, ask whether you’re creating something genuinely new or simply manufacturing future maintenance work.

Similarly, if the same block of content appears across multiple pages, use synced patterns or another reusable-content feature when your CMS supports it. Update it once instead of hunting down six slightly different versions later.

9. Keep your analytics clean

Websites can accumulate analytics cruft too.

Maybe an old agency installed Google Analytics years ago. Someone added a new GA4 implementation later. Then Google Tag Manager was introduced. Eventually nobody is entirely sure which tags are firing or where the data is going. We see this all the time.

If you change how analytics or marketing tags are implemented, make sure the old implementation is actually removed.

You don’t want two instances of GA4 firing on every page.

And you definitely don’t need to keep sending data to an analytics property nobody at your organization can access anymore.

10. Check the website outside your laptop

You made an update. It looks great.

On your computer.

How does it look on your phone?

Every meaningful website change should get at least a quick mobile review. For larger changes, test across different screen sizes, browsers and devices.

You probably don’t need to make sure the website works beautifully on a PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii.

Probably.

But Chrome on your MacBook isn’t the entire internet.

11. Don’t let your brand slowly wander away

Brand drift rarely happens all at once.

It’s a slightly different blue here. A new font there. Someone decides this particular button should be orange. Someone else invents a new card style. Six months later, you’ve somehow created four different button styles and seven shades of gray.

Use your website’s established design system and global styles whenever possible.

Avoid styling individual pieces of content in the editor when the change should really happen globally. This keeps your website consistent and makes future redesigns dramatically easier.

And yes, this applies whether your brand embraces Corporate Memphis, rejects Corporate Memphis or has absolutely no idea what Corporate Memphis is.

12. Keep an eye on speed and security

Performance and security aren’t one-time launch tasks either.

Periodically check page-load performance, particularly after adding new functionality or lots of content. A sudden slowdown can point to oversized images, poorly performing plugins, third-party scripts or other problems.

Security deserves the same ongoing attention.

Keep software updated. Use reputable security tools. Remove unused accounts. Review who has administrative access. Require good password practices and multi-factor authentication where possible.

When someone leaves your organization, their website account shouldn’t become a permanent memorial.

A website needs a gardener, not just a builder

Maybe that’s the bigger lesson.

Launching a website is only the beginning. Over the years, hundreds of tiny decisions determine whether it stays useful.

Upload this image. Add that plugin. Create another form. Leave that old page alone. Make this heading bigger. Give this person admin access. We’ll clean up those events later.

No single decision destroys a website.

It’s the accumulation that gets you.

The healthiest websites have someone paying attention, not necessarily every day, but consistently. They prune old content. Test important functionality. Keep software current. Protect the design system. Watch accessibility. Question unnecessary additions.

Treat your website less like a brochure you finished and more like a garden you’re responsible for tending.

A little regular care is considerably easier than discovering five years from now that you need a machete.