WEB DEVELOPMENT

Claude Code Tutorial Part 8: After Launch and Working Well with Claude Code

Analytics, backups, security, and the habits that make Claude Code produce reliable results. Plus a glossary for everything.

By Site Admin 7 June 2026 10 min read

Part 8 of 8 of Building a Website with Claude Code. See all parts.

After launch

Analytics

Choose one analytics tool. More than one is excess complexity.

Plausible (https://plausible.io), about £7 per month for a small site. No cookies. Lightweight. UK-friendly.
Fathom (https://usefathom.com), similar to Plausible. Marginally pricier.
Google Analytics: free but invasive. Requires a cookie banner and a careful privacy policy.

Look at the dashboard once a week, not once a day. Note the trends: top pages, traffic sources, time on page. Adjust accordingly.

Backups

You need backups of:

The code. If you use Git and push to GitHub, this is automatic.
The database. Most shared hosts run nightly backups but verify that yours does and that you can actually restore one. Test it once.
Uploaded files. If your CMS stores images on the server, those need backing up too.

Set a calendar reminder for a quarterly backup test: download the latest backup, restore it somewhere, confirm it works. Most teams never do this. Be the team that does.

Maintenance and security

The four things that protect a small site:

Strong passwords for every admin account. Use a password manager.
Two-factor authentication everywhere. Hosting account, domain registrar, GitHub, Anthropic, email.
Keep dependencies up to date. Once a month, ask Claude: "Check composer.json and package.json for outdated dependencies. Show me what's worth updating."
HTTPS everywhere. Already covered, but worth repeating.

If something looks compromised, unexplained content changes, unfamiliar admin users, security warnings, change passwords immediately and ask Claude to investigate.

Working well with Claude Code

How to write good prompts

The five habits of effective prompts:

Describe the outcome, not the implementation.
- Bad: "Add a for loop that goes through the array and prints each item."
- Good: "Show each upcoming event from the database in a list on the home page, with the soonest at the top."
State the scope.
- Bad: "Improve the contact form."
- Good: "In the contact form, validate that the email field looks like an email before submitting. Don't change the styling."
Reference real files and lines.
- Bad: "Fix the bug."
- Good: "The homepage hero is rendering twice. The cause is probably in resources/views/home.blade.php around line 40."
Ask for evidence at the end.
- "When you're finished, take a screenshot and tell me whether the layout matches what we agreed."
Tell Claude to ask if anything is unclear.
- "If anything about this brief is ambiguous, ask me before deciding."

When to push back

Claude will sometimes:

Over-engineer something simple.
Add abstractions for hypothetical future needs.
Skip past your real question to give an answer to a related one.
Make changes wider than you asked for.
Insist on a technical choice that doesn't suit your context.

When this happens, push back. Concretely:

That's more than I asked for. Revert. Make only the change I described.

I don't want a framework here. Use plain HTML and CSS.

You skipped my actual question. The visitor sees a 404 when they click the menu. Don't refactor anything else, just fix that.

Be direct. Claude responds well to specific corrections.

Common pitfalls

Long sessions go off the rails. After an hour of conversation, Claude's context fills with the history of every mistake. Performance drops. Use /clear between unrelated tasks.

Claude says "done" when it isn't. Always check. Open the site in a browser. Click the thing that was meant to be fixed. Don't take a textual report as evidence.

Destructive commands run without enough thought. Watch for git reset --hard, rm -rf, DROP TABLE, and git push --force. If Claude proposes one of these and you don't fully understand why, say no.

The dev server gets left running. If you ask Claude to start a development server and it doesn't run it in the background, your terminal is stuck. Press Ctrl+C to stop it, then ask Claude to use background mode.

Sensitive files end up on the server. The .env file, database dumps, and .git folders should never be uploaded to the web root. Before deploying, ask Claude to list everything that will be uploaded. Check it.

Cost creeps up. Long sessions, many file reads, and long command outputs all consume tokens. If you're noticing your usage running ahead of expectations, use /clear more aggressively and keep your CLAUDE.md files lean.

Glossary

API: Application Programming Interface. A way for software to talk to other software.

Backend: The server side of a web application.

Blade: Laravel's templating system for building HTML pages.

CDN: Content Delivery Network. A network of servers around the world that serve your files from the location closest to each visitor.

CMS: Content Management System. The bit that non-developers use to publish content.

Commit: A saved snapshot of code in Git.

CSS: Cascading Style Sheets. The styling layer of the web.

Database: A structured store of information.

Deployment: The process of moving code from your computer to the live server.

DNS: Domain Name System. The phonebook of the internet, translating names to numerical addresses.

Frontend: The visitor-facing side of a web application.

FTP: File Transfer Protocol. A simple way to upload files to a server.

Git: A tool for tracking changes to code.

GitHub: A popular hosting service for Git repositories.

HTML: HyperText Markup Language. The structure of a web page.

HTTP / HTTPS: The protocols by which browsers talk to web servers. HTTPS is encrypted.

JavaScript: The programming language that runs in the browser.

JSON: A common format for storing structured data, used by most modern APIs.

Laravel: A popular PHP framework for building database-driven websites.

Markdown: A simple text format for writing prose. This document is written in it.

MySQL: A widely-used database engine. Standard on shared hosting.

Next.js: A popular React-based framework for building web apps.

Node.js: A way to run JavaScript outside the browser.

npm: Node Package Manager. The tool for installing JavaScript libraries.

OS / operating system: Your computer's underlying software (macOS, Windows, Linux).

PHP: The programming language behind Laravel and WordPress.

PostgreSQL: A capable open-source database. Common in modern cloud setups.

Repository: A folder of code tracked by Git.

Responsive: Adapts to different screen sizes.

SaaS: Software as a Service. Software you pay for and access in a browser.

SEO: Search Engine Optimisation.

Shell / Terminal: The text interface to your computer's operating system.

SSL certificate: The credential that makes HTTPS work.

Static site: A website made of pre-built files that don't change between visits.

WCAG: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The international standard for accessibility.