As a company of one for 20 years, I have made lots of websites. My advice is to intentionally design the product to be low maintenance from the start. When con

As a company of one for 20 years, I have made lots of websites. My advice is to intentionally design the product to be low maintenance from the start. When considering a new feature, always think about future maintenance costs. For example, integrating a 3rd party API? How reliable is that API, what happens if it goes down, is there an alternative API to have on backup, etc? I reinvent the wheel sometimes, if its not too hard, just to decrease external dependencies. Thinking of allowing user generated content such as uploading images, or writing comments/posts? Prepare to spend a good deal of your time moderating that content and managing spam. I go out of my way now to avoid having UGC on my sites, even when it would enhance the product. Going to use the latest bleeding edge technology? What happens in 3 years when it's obsolete or the next upgrade has breaking changes? I try to use dumb boring old LAMP with vanilla JS whenever possible. I have several 10+ year old websites using this boring tech stack that are still chugging along that I literally haven't looked at in years. Whereas I have an old angular 1.0 website for which I have forgotten the build step because I failed to take notes and I doubt "npm install" would work anymore for its ancient dependencies, so its stuck in dinosaur land unless I want to do a total rewrite. Keep it dumb.