Managing technical debt: a guide for website owners

Websites are like cars – how long they last, and how they perform, can depend on how well they’re maintained.

Effectively managing technical debt is an important skill for website owners, and one that is often overlooked. Doing it well can extend the life of your website, and free up money to invest in ongoing improvements to stuff that matters to audiences – design, content, user experience.

It can also help to avoid unpleasant (and, in some cases, serious) surprises, like security issues, things breaking and, in the worst case, having to replace a website sooner than necessary.

We look after a lot of sites now, and many of them we inherited from clients who have come to us because they needed help managing their technical debt.

The most common types of technical debt we see include:

Outdated platforms where the core platform versions or code have become out-of-date through a lack of basic, proactive maintenance.

Third-party plugins, modules, or services that are no longer compatible or “interoperable” with your website's core technology, which can cause conflicts and break functionality. These issues can be relatively minor, or far reaching.

Complex custom code – custom code is sometimes necessary or appropriate, but it always adds to technical debt and can accumulate and create issues over time. The main offender here is custom-built modules that have been built by a dev agency that has gone out of business or is no longer involved in the site.

Just plain old, badly built websites – to be fair, this is the least common issue we see, and is much more common on “low code” platforms like Wordpress or Squarespace, where something has been hacked together by someone’s nephew.

Almost all web technology suffers from technical debt of some kind. In many ways there are only two types of technical debt - planned, or unplanned.

Taking a planned approach to technical debt involves taking some time to understand what it is, how it affects you, and working with your vendor to have a shared understanding of how they will manage technical debt on your site.

Some of the top things we recommend website owners do to proactively manage technical debt are:

Understand Your Web Platform: take the time to learn about the technology behind your website. Even a basic understanding of the platform, its limitations, and common issues can help you make informed decisions.

Have the conversation with your vendor: don't assume your vendor is proactively managing technical debt. Openly discuss your concerns and ask about their approach to identifying, addressing, and preventing technical debt.

Build a Technical Debt Inventory: if you are worried about technical debt, consider asking your vendor to help you to create a list of known technical debt issues, prioritising those that might pose a risk to your website's performance or security.

Set a maintenance budget and know what you’re paying for: at Haunt, we charge a set amount for proactive maintenance, allowing our developers to regularly review websites and perform ongoing updates. If more extensive work is needed, we communicate this to our clients as early as possible and work with them to align it with their budget cycles. Not all agencies work this way – find out what you’re actually paying for and ensure it matches your priorities.

Ultimately, managing technical debt competes for resources and energy with other things, so approaching it strategically is important. Some things to think about are:

How important is technical debt in your specific situation? Try to match your approach to your specific situation and organisational context. A risk/impact matrix can be useful here – in spite of everything in this article, sometimes it is appropriate to just ignore technical debt, or focus attention on one aspect of it. Consider alternative investments and approaches for example, there is a point where replacing your site has a stronger business-case than managing technical debt on your current platform - we’ve seen this more frequently in recent years due, in part, to advances in web technologies and also because of the changing cybersecurity landscape.

Like many aspects of owning a website, managing technical debt can feel complex and challenging, but by taking some relatively simple steps – like starting a conversation with your vendor – it can be managed well, and the benefits can be significant.