Becoming a Website Mechanic — The Real Grind That Started After Building

At first I thought building one good homepage would be enough. Implement the features, polish the design, stack up the articles neatly, and done. But when I actually built one and started running it, that idea shattered completely. A homepage is not something you finish. It is the starting point where a mountain of new tasks begins the moment you call it "done."

After publishing a single article, I would worry whether Google or Naver were finding my work. Even a small spike in visitors made me hover over the analytics screen: "Who are these people? What are they reading?" I thought only humans were visiting. But it was not just Google and Naver — AI agents and crawler bots were knocking on the door around the clock.

So the first thing I built was a way to tell human visitors apart from AI bots. When connecting external APIs, I had to worry about hitting daily call limits. As features accumulated, heavy obligations like security and data backups lined up one after another. Just barely solving one problem, another one dropped right in front of me.

Still, one genuinely fun part of running this myself was finally understanding why big companies always struggle to fix their websites. You cannot start with everything perfect. You only find out what is missing and where things bottleneck by actually running the site. My own site started as a simple place to write, and now I am thinking about structures that let AI extract information cleanly. Life is strange that way.

Fortunately, the site I run now is built around text and useful information rather than heavy photos or videos. From experience, this structure puts far less load on the server and delivers information to visitors faster. You do not need an expensive server or a complex system from day one. Start light, expand gradually — that is the smarter approach.

The biggest trap to avoid is perfectionism. When a new feature catches your eye, you want to bolt it on immediately. If something is slightly off, you want to stay up all night fixing it. But then the real work — publishing good content — gets pushed aside, and you end up as a full-time "mechanic" doing nothing but tweaking the homepage.

I have set a clear rule now. If the site is running fine without problems, there is no need to poke at things that are not broken and create suffering for yourself. Just prevent the catastrophic failures — data loss, security breaches — and fix everything else one by one only when the need actually arises.

Trying, breaking, fixing, and slowly getting better. Not building a perfect house all at once, but maintaining it a little every day and growing old together with it. Running a website, it turns out, is a long game like that.