Recovering and Maintaining the Japan Foundation, Toronto Website

Getting the site back online

The Japan Foundation, Toronto’s website went down completely, caused by outdated code that had stopped working. We replaced the broken code, restored the site’s original appearance, and fixed the 404 errors that had appeared during the outage. We also tracked down and restored a widget that had disappeared from the front page, found through an obscure, unlabeled reference buried in the codebase.

Health check and security review

With the site back up, we ran a full review of the site’s infrastructure: software and plugin versions, SSL certificate validity, anti-spam measures, and backup protocols. We checked firewalls and logging for intrusion detection, reviewed PHP version compatibility, and evaluated stronger access controls, including CAPTCHAs and two-factor authentication.

Mobile experience

We also went through the site’s mobile experience specifically: page load times, touch interactions, and text readability on smaller screens, since a growing share of the Foundation’s visitors were arriving on mobile.

Ongoing maintenance

Since the initial recovery, we’ve kept the site on a maintenance plan: regular diagnostics, security patches, and backup verification to catch problems before they cause another outage.