This is the list. If you maintain your own site, work through it on the schedule below and you’ll avoid most of the ways small business websites quietly stop working. If you pay someone else, use it to check that what you’re paying for matches what’s being done.
Nothing here needs a developer. A few items need someone comfortable with a hosting control panel.
Every week
Load your own site. Not the admin dashboard, the actual public homepage, on a phone, over mobile data rather than your office wifi. This catches more problems than any tool, because you’ll notice things a monitor won’t: an image that didn’t load, a banner from last month’s promotion, a layout that’s broken since the last update.
Submit your own contact form. Use a real message, then check it arrived at the inbox it’s supposed to reach, and check the spam folder if it didn’t. Silent form failures are the single most expensive website fault for a small business, because nothing looks wrong from the outside. You just stop hearing from people.
Skim your inquiries for the phrase “I tried to get hold of you”. It’s the earliest warning that something in the contact path is broken.
Every month
Apply available updates to your platform, theme, and plugins. Take a backup first, then click through your key pages afterwards: homepage, services, contact, and anything that takes a booking or a payment.
Check your backups exist and are recent. Then, at least once, restore one somewhere safe so you know the process works. A backup you’ve never restored is an assumption.
Test the pages that make you money. If your site takes bookings, make a booking. If it takes payment, make a small one and refund it. Do this yourself rather than trusting that it still works because it worked in March.
Review your site on a phone. Most of your visitors are on one. Check that buttons are tappable, that your phone number is a tap-to-call link, and that nothing overflows sideways.
Look at your business hours, prices, and staff list. These go stale faster than anything else on a small business site, and they’re the details customers act on.
Every quarter
Run a broken link check. Free crawlers will do this in a couple of minutes. Dead links accumulate whenever you delete a page or a supplier changes their URL.
Open Google Search Console and read the coverage and page experience reports. You’re looking for pages that dropped out of the index, crawl errors, and mobile usability warnings. If you’ve never set Search Console up, do that first; it’s free and it’s the only place Google tells you directly what it thinks of your site.
Check page speed on your slowest page, usually whichever one has the most images. Oversized images are the most common cause and the easiest to fix. A photo straight off a phone camera is several times larger than any web page needs.
Review your top few pages as a stranger would. Is the thing you most want people to do obvious within a few seconds of landing? Is your phone number visible without scrolling? Are the services listed the ones you actually still offer?
Confirm renewal dates for your domain, hosting, and any premium licenses, and confirm the card on file hasn’t expired. Put the dates in the same calendar you actually use.
Every year
Verify your domain registration and lock it. Domain expiry takes down your website and your email at the same time, and recovering a lapsed domain ranges from irritating to impossible.
Read your own copy end to end. Businesses change faster than their websites. Look for services you no longer offer, claims that are no longer true, and pages describing a version of your business from three years ago.
Update your photography if it shows your storefront, vehicles, staff, or stock that have changed. Nothing dates a site faster than a truck with the old logo on it.
Check your legal pages still describe what you actually do. If you’ve added a booking system, a newsletter, or any new tool that touches customer data, your privacy policy probably needs to say so.
Review who has access. Old agencies, former staff, and one-off contractors accumulate logins. Remove the accounts that shouldn’t still be there, and check that you personally hold the top-level access to your domain, your hosting, and your site. Owners are routinely surprised by this one.
Do a competitor pass. Look at three businesses like yours and note what they’ve added since last year. You’re not copying, you’re checking you haven’t drifted behind.
After any change
Short list, every time, no exceptions.
Click through the page you changed and the two pages that link to it. Submit the contact form. Load the page on a phone. If you renamed or deleted a page, set up a redirect from the old address, because links to it exist in places you can’t see.
When something looks wrong
Work outward. Check whether the site is down for everyone or only you, because caches and DNS make plenty of local-only problems look global. Check whether anything was updated or edited in the last day; recent change is the cause far more often than coincidence. Check whether a renewal has lapsed. Then restore the most recent good backup rather than debugging live, and investigate afterwards with the site back up.
The honest caveat
None of these tasks is difficult. The difficulty is that they’re invisible when done and only visible when skipped, which means they lose every scheduling argument against work that has a customer attached to it.
If this list has been on your to-do list for a while, that’s not a discipline problem. It’s what happens to every recurring task with no deadline. Either put the dates in a calendar you can’t ignore, or hand the list to someone whose job it is.
Website maintenance
If you'd rather not run this list yourself, we run it for you. Hosting, updates, backups and edits, on one monthly fee.
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