Maintenance
How to change your own site without breaking it
The fear of breaking something is why most small business websites still show last year’s hours. The fix is a routine, not courage.
Every edit you will ever make follows the same five steps. Learn them once and the fear goes.
1. Copy before you touch
Before changing anything, save a copy of the file with today's date in the name: index-2026-08-03.html. That is your undo. It costs four seconds and it removes the entire risk.
2. Change one thing
One change, then look at it. Not six changes and then a hunt for which one broke the page. This is the rule that separates a five-minute edit from a lost evening.
3. Look at it before it goes live
Open the file in your browser from your own computer first. What you see there is what visitors will see. If it looks right locally, it will look right published.
4. Publish, then check on your phone
Always the phone, and specifically the page you changed. Most breakage is visible immediately.
5. If it broke, go back
Put yesterday's file back. You are not debugging at ten at night; you are restoring. Then look at it fresh tomorrow.
Safe edits and risky ones
Safe: text between tags, phone numbers, hours, swapping an image for one with the same filename, adding a paragraph that copies the shape of the one above it.
Riskier: anything inside angle brackets, anything in the styles, anything you pasted in without reading. The usual culprit is a deleted </div> or a missing quotation mark, and the symptom is the bottom half of the page looking like it fell over.
The thing people get wrong
They wait until something is urgent, then make five changes at once under pressure. Update your site on an ordinary Tuesday, one line at a time, and it stays correct — which is the entire point of owning it rather than renting it.