The document that prevents most outages
Websites go offline for boring reasons far more often than dramatic ones. A card expired. A reminder went to someone who left. A licence lapsed and the plugin stopped updating until it broke. Every one of these is a date that was known in advance and written nowhere.
The renewals calendar is the fix. It is a spreadsheet or a shared calendar, owned by the business, listing everything the website depends on that renews. It takes an hour to build and it removes a whole class of emergency.
What goes on it
Everything with a renewal date or a recurring charge that, if it stopped, would affect the site or the business's online presence:
- Domain name(s). Every domain you own, including the alternates and the old brand you redirect.
- DNS service, if separate from the registrar (Cloudflare paid plans, for instance).
- Hosting. The web host, and any separate database, storage or CDN service.
- SSL certificate, if not automatic.
- Email hosting. Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or the host's mail.
- Premium theme licence.
- Every premium plugin licence. Forms, SEO, caching, builder, security, backup, WooCommerce extensions.
- Booking system subscription.
- Payment processor, if it has a monthly fee.
- Form, newsletter, CRM, chat and analytics subscriptions.
- Stock image and font licences with expiry.
- Any app or API the site calls that is billed.
- The care plan or maintenance agreement itself.
Most business sites have twelve to twenty rows. Sites that have been through several developers have more, and some of them are for things nobody uses any more, which the calendar also surfaces.
The fields
For each row:
| Field | Why | |---|---| | Item | What it is, in plain words | | Provider | Company and URL of the account | | Account email | Whose login; must be a business address that outlives any one person | | Where the login is | The password manager entry, not the password | | Payment method | Which card, ending in which digits | | Renewal date | Or billing day for monthly items | | Cost | Per renewal | | Auto-renew | Yes or no | | Who is responsible | A role, not a name | | Notes | "Includes 3 sites", "Required by the booking widget", "Could be cancelled" |
The two columns that prevent outages are account email and payment method. An account tied to a former employee's mailbox never receives its renewal warnings. A card that was cancelled quietly fails every renewal on it at once.
Building it in an hour
- Start from the bank statement. Every recurring charge that looks like software or hosting is a row. This catches the things nobody remembers signing up for.
- Add the plugin list. From the WordPress admin, every premium plugin and the theme. Check each one's licence page for the renewal date.
- Add the domain and hosting from the registrar and host accounts.
- Add the tools. Booking, forms, email, analytics, anything with a login.
- For each, find the renewal date and the account email. Log in if you have to. Anything you cannot log in to is a problem to solve now, not a row to leave blank.
- Fix the obvious. Move accounts to a shared business email. Switch auto-renew on for the domain and hosting. Note anything paid annually whose card expires before its renewal.
Running it
- Reminders a month ahead for every annual item, so a card problem or a decision to cancel has time.
- A quarterly glance at the whole list. Is everything still used? Is anything new missing?
- An annual review when the domain renews. Prices change; tools get replaced; the list drifts.
- Update it when things change, in the same moment. A new plugin bought is a row added.
- When a card expires, update every row on that card in one session, before the first renewal fails.
Two habits that make it work
Multi-year the domain. Register it for five or ten years. It is the one item whose lapse is catastrophic and it costs almost nothing extra to make it rare.
Business accounts for everything. A shared mailbox like accounts@yourdomain.com that several people can read, as the login email for every service. Not the owner's personal address, not the marketing manager's. People leave; the mailbox stays.
What the calendar reveals
Building one for the first time almost always finds: a subscription for something removed a year ago; two tools doing the same job; a plugin licence lapsed months ago so the plugin has not updated; and at least one account nobody can access. The savings from cancelling the dead subscriptions often exceed the cost of the hour.
Where this sits
The renewals calendar is built during onboarding onto our care plan and maintained as part of it, with the month-ahead reminders coming to us as well as to the client. It is also one of the first outputs of a rescue when a site arrives after a lapse, because the lapse is rarely the only date that was about to bite.