Who fixes it when it breaks?
Every conversation about getting a website made is a conversation about launch day. Almost none of it is about the long stretch afterward, which is where the thing actually lives — and where it tends to break without telling anyone. The questions worth asking any vendor, and the dull habit that catches what nobody is watching.
A customer mentions it offhand, at the end of a conversation about something else. She emailed twice through his website back in the spring and never heard anything. She figured he was booked up, or not interested in a job that small, so she used somebody else.
He goes home and fills in his own contact form. The page thanks him for his message. Nothing arrives in his inbox. He tries again from his phone, with a different address, and watches the same cheerful thank-you appear. Sometime in the spring, something changed underneath the site, and the form has been taking messages and dropping them ever since. No error. No bounce. No alert anywhere. The form looks exactly the way it looked on the day it was handed over.
What he will never find out is how many other people filled in that form between the spring and this afternoon, and walked away with the entirely reasonable impression that he does not return messages.
launch day is the short part
Nearly every conversation about getting a website made is a conversation about launch. The proposal describes a launch. The timeline ends at a launch. The nervous energy on both sides is pointed at the day the thing goes live, and then it goes live, the project is over, and the site enters the part of its existence where it actually lives — the long, quiet stretch afterward that nobody discussed and nobody assigned to anyone in particular.
A sign over a door is finished when it is hung. Nothing happens to it in the meantime. Software is not like that. Everything underneath a website keeps moving whether or not you touch a single word of it. Browsers update. Hosting companies change their server settings. The language the site runs on reaches the end of its supported life and stops receiving security fixes, quietly, whether or not the front end still looks fine. Plugins update themselves. Certificates expire on a schedule. Mail providers tighten what they will accept and from where. Your site sits still in the middle of all that. You did not move. The water did.
Most mornings, none of it matters. But it means the honest description of a website is not a thing you buy. It is a thing you keep — and the keeping was never on the timeline.
the failures you never see
Some breakages announce themselves. The site is down, the phone starts ringing, and you know within the hour. Those are the good ones, in the same way a smoke alarm is good.
The expensive ones are silent, and the contact form is the classic. A form that takes a submission, shows the thank-you, and never delivers the mail is common enough that a whole cottage industry of guides exists to explain it — the usual culprit being that mail sent through a site's default path gets refused or dropped somewhere between the server and the mail provider, with nothing surfacing on the page the visitor sees. The failure is invisible from both ends. The customer thinks the message was sent. You think nobody wrote.
Others live in the same family. An expired certificate does not take a site down; it just starts greeting visitors with a browser warning that the connection is not private, which, for a stranger deciding whether to trust you, is roughly as good as being down. A booking link points at a calendar you stopped using. The number in the footer is a line you gave up answering ages ago. None of it shows up anywhere you would think to look. There is no dashboard for people who assumed you were ignoring them.
the question that tells you the most
If you ask a web vendor only one thing, make it this, and make it specific:
Six months after launch, a customer tells me the contact form is not working. Walk me through exactly what happens next.
Then listen for four things.
Who notices? For most small sites the honest answer is nobody, and it is worth hearing someone say so out loud. Ask whether anything is actually watching the site, and press on what watching means. Something that checks the page still loads is cheap and easy and would not have caught a single failure described above. Something that checks the form still delivers is a different thing entirely, and much rarer. If nothing is watching, your customers are the monitoring system, and they file their reports by leaving.
Who is responsible? Ask who does the fixing, whether that fixing is part of what you are already arranging or a separate piece of work, and what happens when the cause turns out to belong to somebody else — the host, the form tool, the mail service. The bad outcome here is rarely a flat refusal. It is a shrug pointed in three directions while you stand in the middle.
How do I reach you? A named person, a shared inbox, a support address, a form on their own site. Ask what the path looks like when that person is on holiday, or has moved on, or has taken on considerably more clients than they had the week they took you on. Small vendors are often excellent and often one deep. That is a real tradeoff, not a disqualification, but you should know which one you are choosing.
What does this take out of my day? A stated response window is worth less than a recent example, so ask for the example: the last time something broke for another client, what it was, how they found out, how long the customer waited. Then ask who does the chasing — the email, the second email, the working out of whose problem it is. If the honest answer is that you do, you have not arranged for maintenance. You have arranged for the right to report a fault.
whose name is on the door
The other half of the after-launch question has nothing to do with breakage. It is about whether you can leave.
Whose name is the domain registered in? It should be your business, with your email address on the registration record. When a vendor registers the domain under their own company instead, they become the registrant of record: the party holding the transfer authorization, the party the renewal notices go to, the party a registrar will listen to. Nearly always that is convenience rather than malice, and nearly always it never comes up. It comes up on the day you want to go elsewhere and the person holding your name is the person you are going elsewhere from.
Who controls the DNS? The setting that decides where your domain actually points — the site, the mail, all of it. It can live somewhere other than the registration, and whoever holds it can point your name at something else, or at nothing.
Whose hosting account is it? Your own account with a host, or a slice of the vendor's reseller account? The second is not sinister and is sometimes better run than the first. But it means that moving is an action they take rather than one you take.
Do you have the logins? The list is longer than people expect: registrar, DNS, hosting, the site's admin, analytics, Search Console, the form tool, whatever sends the mail. Not an assurance that you could have them. The actual credentials, in your possession, written somewhere that is not the memory of one busy person.
The compressed version of all four: if I decided to leave next spring, what do I take with me, and what do I have to ask you for? A vendor who answers that cleanly and without flinching is telling you something real.
It is worth saying plainly that all of this points back at whoever wrote the page you are reading. Catalyst Market is in the same business — ready-made templates for a set of trades, with a real person assembling the site from a brief you fill in. None of the questions above get softer when you aim them here. Ask them of us. Ask them of everybody.
the dull habit that catches most of it
Once every month or so, use your own site the way a stranger would. On your phone, on cell data, not the office wifi. Fill in the contact form as if you were somebody with a problem and a short list of names. Write a real message, use a real address, then go and confirm the thing actually landed — in the inbox you read, not a folder nobody opens. Call the number in the footer and hear where it rings. Click the booking link. Click the link in whatever confirmation comes back.
It takes about as long as a coffee, and it is the only item on this page that needs nobody but you.
While you are there, keep a plain document — not on the site, not in your head — listing every account the business leans on: what it is, whose email is on it, when it renews. Almost nobody has this. It becomes valuable at precisely the moment when assembling it becomes hard.
the point
There is no way to tell from a proposal how a vendor behaves long after the work is finished. The good ones and the bad ones write nearly identical documents, and the difference surfaces in a moment neither of you can see from here. So the questions above are not a test that produces a score. They are a way of finding out whether someone has thought about the part of the job that comes after the fun part.
The moment to ask who fixes it when it breaks is the moment before anyone has a reason to tell you what you want to hear.