Website maintenance checklist for growing businesses

Most website problems are not sudden. Plugins and libraries fall behind, an SSL certificate quietly expires, a contact form stops sending emails, or pages slowly become slower as images pile up. Each one costs you enquiries, and some of them put your visitors' data at risk.

A simple routine catches these issues early, when they are quick to fix.

• Check that the site loads and key pages work on a phone and a laptop.
• Submit your own contact form and confirm the message arrives.
• Look at your uptime monitor or hosting dashboard for errors or downtime.
• Reply to enquiries, comments or reviews that came in through the site.

• Apply security updates to your framework, CMS, plugins and server.
• Confirm that backups are running, and test restoring one every few months.
• Check page speed for your most important pages and compress large images.
• Look for broken links and fix or redirect them.
• Review Google Search Console for crawl errors and pages that dropped out of the index.

• Update service descriptions, prices, team details and photos.
• Review which pages bring in visitors and enquiries, and improve the weakest ones.
• Remove plugins, scripts and user accounts that are no longer needed.
• Check accessibility basics: readable text, colour contrast, alt text and keyboard navigation.

• Renew your domain name and SSL certificate well before they expire.
• Review your hosting plan: is it still the right size and price?
• Update your privacy policy and terms if your data practices changed.
• Ask whether the design and structure still match how your business works today.

If updates keep breaking things, your developer is no longer available, or you simply don't have time to do this every month, a maintenance plan makes sense. A good partner will review your site first, fix what is urgent and then keep everything above running in the background.