What actually breaks a small business website

Nobody wakes up and breaks their own site. It happens in one of four ways, and I found all four in the audit:

1. The domain registration lapsed. The card on file expired, the renewal email went to an address nobody reads, and the address stopped resolving. This is the most common one by a distance.
2. A plugin updated and broke a page. Or did not update, and got exploited. A WordPress site typically runs fifteen to thirty plugins, each written by a different person on a different release schedule.
3. The hosting plan lapsed or the host changed something. PHP gets upgraded on the server, the theme was written for the old version, and the site goes white.
4. The platform shut down. 17 sites in my audit are sitting on builders that no longer exist. Google Business Sites is the famous one: every business.site address it had issued stopped working.

Notice what those have in common. Not one of them is the business owner changing their mind. Three of the four are consequences of the site being made of moving parts.

What a static site is

A static site is the original way the web worked, and it has quietly become the modern way again. Your pages are finished files: the HTML, the stylesheet, the photographs. A visitor asks for a page and the server hands over the file. Nothing is assembled, nothing is queried, nothing is executed.

That means there is no database to corrupt, no plugin to update, no admin login to brute force, no PHP version to fall behind, and no content management system with a release cycle. There is nothing in the site that can change unless somebody changes it on purpose.

What WordPress is genuinely better at

I am not going to pretend otherwise, because you will find out and then you will not trust the rest of this.

• You can log in and edit it yourself. This is the real one. If you want to add a blog post every week or reprice fifty products, you want a content management system, and you should not hire me for that.
• Complicated shops. Hundreds of products, variants, stock levels, and shipping rules. Shopify exists for exactly this and does it well.
• Booking, memberships, forums, user accounts. Anything where visitors log in and the site remembers them.

If your business is any of those, say so and I will tell you so. What I build fits the much larger group: a business that needs to be found, believed, and phoned.

What that trade costs you

The honest cost of static is that you cannot rewrite a paragraph yourself at eleven at night. You email me and I do it, usually the same day, and it costs $45 a change or $150 for five banked against the year. That is written down on the scope page rather than discovered later.

For a shop with a fixed set of services, an address, some photographs and a phone number, that trade is heavily in your favour. You are swapping the theoretical ability to edit, which most owners use twice and then never again, for a site that is still standing in 2031.

Speed is the other half of it

The median page in my audit pulled 1.9MB for a single page and took 3.3 seconds. 103 sites pulled more than 5MB. A plugin-built page loads a stylesheet and a script for every plugin whether or not the page uses it, which is how a page with four photographs on it ends up requesting eighty files.

A static page requests the files it actually needs. On a phone on mobile data that is not a technical nicety, it is whether the page appears before the customer gives up. The whole of this site, including the photographs, is smaller than the median single page I measured.

What I do about the one thing that can still break

The domain. It is the one moving part a static site still has, and it is the exact failure that killed most of the dead sites I found. So I record your renewal date and email you before it comes due, every year, for as long as I am doing this, whether or not you have paid me for anything since. That promise is written on the scope page too.