Domains, delivery and craft
What is Technical debt?
The future cost of a decision taken for speed now. Some is deliberate and sensible — shipping to a deadline and fixing after. The damaging kind is accidental and undocumented, discovered by whoever tries to change something two years later.
Also called: shortcuts · accumulated compromise
How it shows up on a website
- A plugin that cannot be updated because a customisation depends on its internals
- Content in three formats because the CMS changed and nothing was migrated
- Styles nobody can remove because it is unclear what uses them
- A dependency abandoned upstream, still shipping in production
- Business rules living only in a template nobody documented
The interest payment is real
Debt is paid in the time every future change takes. A codebase where a simple edit requires an afternoon of archaeology has a specific cost, and it is usually larger than the cost of having done it properly the first time.
Write down the deliberate kind
A comment saying what was skipped and why converts hidden debt into a scheduled repayment. The undocumented shortcut is the expensive one, because the next person cannot tell a deliberate compromise from a mistake.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. Who actually owns your website — a checklist you can verify today covers this properly — 3 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.