Hurricane season: what your website should be doing while the island holds its breath

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30, peaking between mid-August and mid-October. On both our islands everyone knows the drill: shutters, water, a plan B. Almost nobody thinks about their website. Which is a shame, because that is exactly when it becomes your only point of contact with the outside world — and when you find out whether it was built to hold on its own.

Your site works when you can't

During a weather event and in the days after, your customers aren't on the island. They're in New York, Paris, Miami, and they all have the same question: is my December booking still happening? They won't call you — the network is jammed, and they assume you have bigger problems. They'll check your website. If it says nothing, they cancel, or they look elsewhere.

Your site is also what suppliers, partners, press and sometimes your insurer will check. One page with accurate information, in English and French, saves you thirty phone calls and reassures people you don't have time to reassure one at a time.

The trouble with websites that need babysitting

A conventional website — WordPress or similar — isn't a document. It's software running continuously on a server, with a database, plugins and updates. As long as everything works, nobody notices. But that kind of setup periodically needs someone to tend to it: a server that stops responding, a plugin to fix, a backup to verify.

The timing is brutal: that "someone" is you, in the season when you have the least availability and sometimes no connection at all. A site that needs attention will fail at the worst possible moment.

A static site has nothing to maintain

That's the technical reason we only build static sites. Your pages are generated ahead of time, once, then copied out to a global network of servers. There's nothing running behind them: no database to back up, no plugin to patch, no process to restart.

Three very practical consequences:

• Your local outage isn't your website's outage. No power at home, no fiber at the office: the site keeps serving the rest of the world, because it isn't hosted here.
• There's no fragile link to watch. A file doesn't crash. It's the same property that makes it fast the rest of the year — under 2 seconds to load, where a conventional site hosted in mainland France takes 6 to 8 seconds to reach Miami.
• You can edit it from a phone. A mobile connection is enough to publish an update, wherever you are.

The two things to prepare now

Everything else can be improvised. These two can't.

A status banner, written in advance. A bilingual strip across the top of every page that you switch on in two minutes: "Open as usual", "Closed until…", "December bookings confirmed." The wording has to exist before you need it. That's the difference between publishing in two minutes and hunting for who has the password.

An up-to-date access list. Who can edit the site, with which credentials, from which phone — ideally a second person who is off-island. Plenty of businesses discover at the worst moment that the only person who can touch the site is an agency nobody can reach.

Add the Google Business reflex to that: hours and status can be changed from your phone, and it's often the first thing people see.

Reopening is a race, and first place matters

The aftermath counts just as much. The first restaurant to post "we reopen Friday," the first villa to confirm its availability, wins back the guests who were hesitating. On a static site that update takes a few minutes and depends on nobody.

We won't promise nothing will happen to you — and we never promise page one on Google. What we do guarantee is smaller and checkable: a site that needs no one to stay standing, and that you can update from a phone with one bar of signal.

Studio Lagon builds fast, bilingual static websites for St Martin and St Barts — see the packages and pricing, or have your current site's resilience checked through the contact form.