Short and long term maintenance of a web platform

It’s important to maintain your company’s web platform, to put your brand in the best possible light and drive conversions. Maintenance can be divided into two categories, short-term and long-term. Short-term maintenance involves fixing and repairing immediate issues like bugs. This maintenance can be urgent if there is a high-impact bug. Long-term maintenance is more about planning and tackling strategic goals.

Let’s explore the approaches and discipline required to manage both of these activities.

For short-term maintenance, you should aim to address such immediate issues as bugs and usability issues, security vulnerabilities in dependencies, and scaling up for spikes in load. Depending on the volume of your website traffic, or other circumstances (e.g. a widely announced public event) such issues may be extremely urgent and require immediate interruption of the team.

Our recommended approach here boils down to a few key factors. First, invest in CI/CD so that changes to the site can be applied quickly, or better blazingly fast. Next, set up monitoring and alerts to give you visibility into the current state of the website. We wrote a post about that here  .

Finally, set up a vulnerability monitoring system so you are notified when a security issue is identified in one of your code dependencies. Together with a properly configured CI/CD pipeline this should provide almost bulletproof protection from vulnerabilities.

Long-term maintenance is more about making the web platform efficient in the long run. Cost and compute optimization is a big factor here. Basically any optimisation which can save money or man-hours in the long term is the goal here.

Choosing the right vendors is especially important. Go for the vendor that has the best balance of cost efficiency and features. Ideally, you should design your web platform so that it is easy to switch between vendors (although don’t be too paranoid about vendor lock-in). CMS can be especially tough here. There is no common standard for CMS API. So if you switch between CMSs, you have to reimplement quite a lot of content rendering routines on the website.

Design is another area where long-term maintenance comes into play. Web designs can become outdated quickly, so it’s best to introduce small design tweaks every few months, and do major redesigns every 2⁠–⁠3 years. When it comes to design update, it always goes smoother if you follow a design style guide. Without one updates to website design can be quite tedious — you have to walk through all the pages and update all the “special” buttons separately.

The goal of short-term maintenance is to keep the web platform up and running. Failing to do short-term maintenance can make the platform unstable and hurt your company’s reputation. Long-term maintenance makes the site more efficient across all dimensions. If long-term maintenance is done wrong, it will make the web platform expensive and ultimately hurt conversions. It is also not rare that failures in long-term maintenance lead to short term issues. E.g. wrongly done compute optimisation can immediately cause your workload interruptions.

Following long and short term maintenance routines will also inevitably impact your team. Engineers need to build a discipline. They should dedicate special sprints for maintenance needs, or plan feature-implementation sprints with maintenance tasks in mind. Planning is important, especially in the long term. Make sure you accumulate and schedule repetitive maintenance tasks somewhere.

When building and budgeting a web platform, make sure to account for both short and long-term maintenance. Your work is not done when the initial version of the platform goes live. To drive the impact of your maintenance work, use the right tools, track the right metrics, and set clear goals.