The cost of keeping old sites

I've been working on a string of really old sites recently. I'm certain that quite a few website owners do not know what it takes to update their website. Put simply, the older your site, the harder it is to make changes. You can compare this to fixing your car. Getting replacement parts for a car becomes increasingly more difficult as the car gets older because manufacturers stop making parts for that old model to keep up with demand for newer models.

Bad coding aside, you may have noticed that the cost of making changes is increasing over time, or that certain defects in the system are just never 100% fixed and keep resurfacing. So why do simple changes take so long now compared to back then? What's happened since the site was first completed?

People

As people flow into and out of a company, so to does the knowledge. The older the site, the more likely the original developers have moved on. For any changes you may want (big or small), a new developer will need a few hours just to setup the site in their developement environment. There might be a specific business case that the new developer is not aware of (for example, all emails sent by the site must contain the company logo except one) and so this will introduce a defect, one that may not be picked up for several months.

Frameworks and technology

New techonolgies and frameworks are being released regularly. These are the tools we use to make our life "easier" when developing any kind of software. Developers constantly refreshing their skills, and knowledge of older frameworks will eventually be forgotten. The underlaying technology or framework used to create your original site may now be obsolete. It becomes increasingly difficult to find people experienced enough to make changes (correctly) to older tech.

In addition to this, the developer may not be able to do what you're asking using the older tech, and so they "bolt on" these changes any way they can. Most website owners will not see this code, and so are unaware of the monstrosity this creates in the code. Its analogous to bolting on a 3rd arm because the code that runs the other 2 arms is too hard to change. When the next developer comes along, they won't know what this is or how to work with it as it doesn't "fit" with the rest of the code, and so they will bolt on something else.

CMS

I guess this is a subset of the previous, so all the same applies. CMSes are updated regularly and some even die, and are no longer supported. Updating your CMS will affect your entire site, and so carries considerable risk. Suffice to say, the more often you update, the smaller the number of changes in your chosen CMS, the smaller the overall risk.

 

So consider all these things and then you can make an informed decision as to whether or not to update your site. Generally, if you're planning on making quite a few changes, it might be worth considering an upgrade.