What Do I Need To Do?
The short answer is to ask whoever looks after your website about the change and what they advise in terms of preparation. Costs will vary slightly depending on your situation in terms of age and frequency to which your website is maintained. Allow me to elaborate a little on this below.
1: For businesses that regularly maintain their website on a monthly basis
Chances are you don’t need to do anything. Your developer or agency will take care of everything for you within your allocated retainer hours each month. They have most likely already got a plan in place and will contact you by the end of the first week of February 2020.
2: For businesses with a website built within the last two years
If you have a lightweight CMS based website with minimal third-party dependencies then you will most likely require little to minimal efforts to get things realigned and up to date. However, be prepared for a 2-4 hours of extra work at least. Bigger sites may require more as plugins/templates may break.
3: For businesses that haven’t updated their site since it was built
Now if you never opted for website maintenance it’s not all your fault. It just most likely means that your developers never fully explained the importance of the activity to you at the time. However, if this was explained and you chose to ignore it anyway thinking it was just an upsell then shame on you. Unfortunately, you are about to find out the problems this can cause the hard way.
It’s most likely that your software release and codebase in prehistoric making it more likely for an issue to present itself during the upgrade process. There is no way to tell how bad the problems will be and what they are exactly until the update process begins. In a worst-case scenario, the work required may be too considerable and your developer or agency may suggest a rebuild.
