A website isn't a thing you launch and forget — it's a thing you run. Skip maintenance and it gets slow, breaks on mobile, or quietly stops converting. Here's the website support checklist we use, organised by how often each task actually needs doing.
Every month
- Check it on a phone. More than half your visitors are on mobile. Open the key pages on an actual phone and try to do what a customer would do.
- Test the money path. Walk through your booking, checkout, or contact form end to end. Broken forms fail silently and you lose leads without ever knowing.
- Apply security updates. Plugins, themes, dependencies, and the platform itself. Most site compromises exploit an update that shipped months ago.
- Skim your analytics. Look for pages that suddenly lost traffic or a form whose submissions dropped to zero — both usually mean something broke.
Every quarter
- Run a speed check. Test your top pages with a tool like PageSpeed Insights. A site that was fast at launch drifts slower as content and scripts accumulate.
- Fix broken links. Internal and external. Dead links hurt both visitors and SEO.
- Review your backups. Don't just confirm backups exist — confirm you could actually restore from one.
- Prune what's stale. Old promotions, outdated prices, last year's hours. Wrong information is worse than none.
Every year
- Audit your SEO basics. Titles, meta descriptions, structured data, and your sitemap. Search changes; your markup should keep up.
- Check accessibility. Contrast, alt text, keyboard navigation. It widens your audience and reduces legal risk.
- Decide: patch or rebuild? If you're spending more time fighting the site than improving it, that's the signal.
Patch vs. rebuild — the honest version
Not every struggling site needs a rebuild. Many need a focused round of fixes and a maintenance habit. Some are past the point where patching is worth it.
The deciding question is simple: is the site's foundation sound and just neglected, or is it fighting you at every turn? Neglected-but-sound is a support problem. Fighting-you-constantly is a rebuild conversation.
When to bring in help
If this checklist feels like one more job you don't have time for, that's exactly what a maintenance retainer is for — we keep the site fast, patched, and online so you can run the business. Many clients start with a one-off audit or fix and move to ongoing website support once they see what steady maintenance prevents.
Tell us what your site is doing and we'll tell you whether it needs a tune-up or a rebuild.