Website maintenance in Miami: what 149 local sites show

Most small-business websites in Miami are not broken. They load, the phone number is there, the photos look fine. What goes wrong with an unmaintained site is quieter: it falls behind, one month at a time, and nobody notices until a form stops sending or a browser starts warning visitors away.

I wanted to know how common that is here, so I checked. These are the numbers from 149 local homepages, and what each one means for the owner.

What 149 Miami-Dade and Broward websites show

• 95 of the 149 run on WordPress. That is normal: it is the most common way small sites are built, and it is fine, as long as someone keeps it updated.
• 43 of those say which version they run, and 10 are not on the current release. Six are still on version 6 or older, and one reports version 5.2, a release from 2019.
• 19 of the 101 sites that show a copyright year show one before 2026. Fifteen still say 2024 or earlier.
• 7 of 138 don't send a plain http:// visitor to the secure https:// version, so anyone who types the address by hand can land on the unsecured page.

None of those is a disaster on its own. Together they are a reliable sign of the same thing: nobody is looking after the site.

Why an old version matters more than an old footer

A stale copyright year is cosmetic. A visitor who notices it just wonders whether you are still open. An old WordPress version is different: WordPress publishes its security fixes in the open, which means the weaknesses of old versions are public too. Plugins are the same, and a typical small site has a dozen or more of them, each updated on its own schedule.

The other risk is less dramatic and more common: an update made in a hurry, years late, breaks the contact form or the booking page, and the owner finds out from a customer, if at all.

What website maintenance actually covers

• Updates to WordPress, the theme and every plugin, with a fresh backup taken first and the site checked afterwards.
• Backups you can actually restore, kept somewhere other than the site itself.
• Uptime and security checks, so you hear about a problem before your customers do.
• The certificate, the redirects and the forms checked on a schedule, not when something breaks.
• Small edits: new hours, a new service, this year in the footer.

You can do all of that yourself if you have the hour a month and you enjoy it. If you don't, my Website Care plans start at $99 USD a month and cover sites I didn't build, starting with a free health check.

Check yours in two minutes

• Scroll to your footer. Does it say 2026?
• Type your address with http:// in front. Does the browser end up on the https version?
• Send yourself a message through your own contact form. Did it arrive?
• Ask whoever built the site when WordPress and the plugins were last updated. "I'm not sure" is an answer.

How I got these numbers: on November 7, 2026 I loaded the homepages of 157 small-business websites in Miami-Dade and Broward, from the list I research for outreach. 149 answered. I looked only at what any visitor's browser receives: the WordPress version the page reports about itself, the year in the footer, and whether a plain http:// address forwards to the secure one. No logins, no scanning tools, no names published.