What Happens After Launch

Launch is the middle of the project

Businesses treat launch as the end and it is closer to the halfway point. Everything until launch is a hypothesis about what visitors want; everything after it is evidence.

The sites that keep working are the ones where somebody spends a couple of hours a month on them. The sites that need replacing in three years are the ones nobody touched.

Week one: watch and fix

• Check forms actually deliver — send a real one and confirm it arrives
• Watch error tracking daily; the first week surfaces browser and device issues
• Check analytics is recording, before you need the numbers
• Spot-check redirects if this was a migration
• Ask three customers to use it and watch them without helping

The single most common post-launch failure we are called about is a contact form that has been silently failing since the day it went live.

Month one: measure, do not redesign

Resist changing things based on opinion in the first month. Gather data instead: where people arrive, where they leave, which pages get read, how many enquiries per hundred visitors.

One month of real behaviour will contradict at least one confident assumption from the design process. That contradiction is the most valuable thing the project produces.

Month three: the first improvement round

1. Fix the page with high traffic and high exit — it is losing people who wanted something
2. Strengthen whatever converts best; there is usually one page doing most of the work
3. Cut or merge pages nobody visits
4. Add the answers to the questions your enquiries keep asking
5. Re-check speed on real devices, since content has been added since launch

This round typically costs a few days and produces more measurable improvement than the last month of the original build did.

The maintenance that prevents decay

That is perhaps two hours a month. Sites that get it stay usable for five or six years; sites that do not need replacing in three, which is a much larger bill.

When to rebuild rather than improve

Improve when the structure is sound and the problems are page-level. Rebuild when the platform is unsupported, the content model cannot express what the business now does, or maintenance costs more than a rebuild would.

“It looks dated” is on its own a poor reason. A dated site that converts is doing its job, and the budget is better spent on the pages that do not.

Frequently asked questions