<b>Technical issues reappear at 4.7% per month without monitoring</b>

<b>Technical issues reappear at 4.7% per month without monitoring</b>
We re-audited 61 sites at 30/60/90 days after a clean technical audit to measure regression.

— New broken internal links: +2.1%/mo ▓▓░░░░░░░░
— New redirect chains: +1.4%/mo ▓░░░░░░░░░
— New soft-404 / orphans: +1.2%/mo ▓░░░░░░░░░
— Total regression: ~4.7%/mo compounding

A site at 99% technical health drifts to ~86% within a year untouched. The decay is driven by routine publishing — every CMS deploy, content edit, and merch update introduces a small fraction of new breakage.

The sites that held health weren't audited more thoroughly; they were monitored continuously via log + crawl diffs.

So what: a one-time audit is a snapshot of a moving target. Budget for continuous diff-monitoring over annual deep-dives — catching 4.7%/mo early beats excavating a year of accumulated debt.