A monthly site review, a checklist for the owner
A website is not like a picture on the wall that, once hung, stays unchanged. It is more of a living organism, something updates, something expires, something stops working. The good news: to catch most problems, a quarter of an hour once a month is enough. Here is a simple checklist any owner can go through, even without technical knowledge.
1. Visit the site as a customer
Open your site on a phone and on a computer. Check whether:
- everything loads and looks right (no broken layout),
- the key pages work: offer, contact, pricing,
- there is a padlock by the address (a working SSL certificate),
- the site is not suspiciously slow.
It is the simplest test, you look at the site through a customer's eyes and catch what stands out.
2. Test the form and contact
Send a test message through the contact form and check that it arrived. This is a surprisingly common silent problem: the form "works", but the emails go nowhere, and you lose customer enquiries without knowing it. Also check that the phone number and email on the site are current.
3. Check for signs of a break-in
A quick look from a security angle:
- whether your site looks normal in Google results (no strange, foreign page titles),
- whether the browser does not show a "dangerous" warning,
- whether there are no strange redirects or content you did not add,
- whether an unknown user with administrator privileges has appeared in the panel.
If anything here looks suspicious, treat it as a priority, the earlier you catch an infection, the smaller the damage.
4. Install updates (sensibly)
Look in the panel and check whether updates are available for the system, plugins and theme. Before you click, make sure you have a fresh backup, and after updating check that the site still works. (We wrote separately about how to update safely.)
5. Glance at the deadlines: domain and certificate
Once a month it is worth glancing at when the domain and SSL certificate expire. These are two things that can take a site offline overnight, and they are easy to miss. Better to find out a month in advance than on the day the site stops working.
6. Check the backup
Make sure the backup is actually running and that you know where it is. A backup you have forgotten about, or that stopped working a few months ago, will not protect you in a crisis. Now and then it is also worth checking that the site can be restored from it.
7. Review the content
Finally, with an owner's eye: is the offer current, do the prices match, are the contact details correct, and is the seasonal information (hours, promotions) not out of date. Outdated content quietly undermines customer trust.
A quarter of an hour that pays off
This list sounds like a lot, but in practice it is a dozen or so minutes. Regularity matters more than thoroughness, better to glance over the whole thing every month than to do one big audit a year (and spend the other eleven months not knowing something is wrong).
And if you do not want to remember this every month, that is exactly what site care is about: this review (and much more) happens automatically, in the background, and you get a signal only when it is really needed. Want to take this off your plate? Get in touch.