What will happen to a website if it is not updated for years?

Why a Website Cannot Work Without Updates

A website can remain unupdated for years and still look perfectly functional from the outside – all pages open, and the information remains in place. This can create the impression that there is no need to update anything. This is a false impression because, despite the frontend continuing to work properly, the website’s technical environment continues to “age” – server software, APIs, browsers, various plugins, CMSs, and other integrations are constantly changing. In other words, a website cannot simply be created once and forgotten. It needs to be updated and kept compatible with other services and systems to which it is already connected or may be connected in the future. What needs to be done to keep your website functional will be discussed in the following sections. 

Outdated Software and Security Issues

The components and software that a website runs on, including CMSs, plugins, and libraries, regularly receive updates, hot fixes, and security updates. These updates help “patch” previously discovered software vulnerabilities. For example, developers may update a CMS from version 2.0 to version 2.1, fixing security vulnerabilities. If a website receives ongoing technical support, its CMS will also be updated to version 2.1, eliminating the corresponding vulnerabilities. However, if a website remains unupdated for a long time, it continues to run on previous iterations with all their known vulnerabilities. Moreover, the longer a website remains without updates, the more outdated components and unpatched vulnerabilities can accumulate, increasing security risks. This is especially important for websites that interact with admin panels, forms, user accounts, payments, and so on.

This does not mean that the website will necessarily be “hacked”, but delaying updates significantly increases the risks. 

Accumulation of Functionality and Integration Failures

In addition to vulnerabilities and security risks, older software versions may also lose technical support. Let’s look at another example: suppose CMS developers update the software to version 2.1 and discontinue support for version 2.0. This means that potential issues with the previous version will no longer be fixed. If a website continues to use unsupported versions of a CMS, API, or other components, it may encounter problems such as plugins conflicting with each other due to version incompatibility, forms no longer submitting requests, authorization not working, and outdated code causing errors. 

Visually, the website may continue to work as usual, creating the false impression that nothing needs to be changed. However, without regular website maintenance, functionality and integration failures can gradually accumulate. Therefore, timely technical website support not only reduces security risks but also helps maintain the stable operation of existing functionality.

Website Slowdown and a More Complicated Customer Journey

A website, especially a commercial one, is not a static structure that only needs to be built well once. Over time, outdated or temporary technical solutions may accumulate in the codebase, increasing technical debt (colloquially referred to as “hacks”), along with heavy scripts, outdated plugins, or unoptimized media files. All of this can negatively affect page loading speed on both desktop and mobile devices. In addition, UI/UX solutions may also become outdated over time. 

All these issues not only impair the website’s performance but also create additional obstacles along the user journey and may reduce the likelihood of conversion.

An Outdated Website Is a Problem for SEO

The lack of timely technical maintenance can also negatively affect a website’s SEO. In addition to the previously mentioned issues with loading speed and mobile optimization, the risk of accumulating broken links or pages returning a 404 error increases over time. Furthermore, without technical maintenance, indexing issues may go unnoticed: incorrect canonical settings, errors in robots.txt, broken internal links, orphan pages, and other problems that may make it harder for Google to find the right pages or cause it to index the wrong ones. 

And most importantly – outdated content. For example, a website may still contain information about a service or product that is no longer available, while the latest blog post may be an article titled “Best Website Developers in 2021”. This does not necessarily mean that such information is low-quality or that Google does not index it, but up-to-date content may better match the user’s search query. 

Read more about SEO setup in our article.

Why You Cannot Update a Website “All at Once”

Unfortunately, comprehensive website updating is not as simple as clicking an “update all” button. Before carrying out a major update, several important stages should be completed: 

• Backup – a backup copy of the website that should be saved before making changes. Depending on the system, this may include files, code, databases, or all of them together. If something goes “wrong” during the update, you can always return to the previous version; 

• Staging – a separate testing environment, or another clone of the website. In other words, a safe environment where you can update functionality, plugins, and dependencies and test their viability without risking the main website;

• Compatibility – a website may work with older systems and a specific set of plugins. When moving to a modern version, some components or plugins may no longer be compatible. In this case, you will need to find alternatives or rewrite the functionality; 

• Update sequence – it is risky to update the entire environment at once or jump directly to newer versions. A better approach is to plan a phased migration – update one component, test the website, and only then move on to the next. Otherwise, after a mass update, you may have to check all dependencies to understand why the website has “gone down”; 

• Functionality testing – after updating, the user journey should be tested. For example: a customer places an order, but at some stage the API stops working, causing the order to be lost. 

• Fixing conflicts after updates – one plugin is incompatible with another, an API has changed in a third-party service, or custom code conflicts with the updated CMS. All dependencies need to be checked again, followed by another round of testing. 

Considering the above, it is difficult to overstate the importance of timely technical website support. This is a comprehensive process that includes backups, testing, compatibility checks, identifying and resolving issues, as well as the actual updating process. The more regularly a website is maintained, the easier it is to keep it in a stable condition. 

Conclusion

A website will not necessarily “break” the day after support is discontinued, but that is precisely why problems with its operation can easily go unnoticed. Over time, they can accumulate like a snowball, while fixing them will require significantly more effort. Outdated components, security vulnerabilities, technical debt, and compatibility issues all require ongoing and systematic control. To keep a website stable, secure, and up to date, technical website maintenance should be performed regularly. The Geniustudio team can take these tasks on as part of website technical support.