Most small business owners set up their website and forget about it. That's understandable — you're busy running your business. But a little regular attention goes a long way. Here's a 15-minute monthly checklist that keeps your site healthy, secure, and working the way it should.
1. Check That All Your Forms Are Working
This one gets overlooked constantly. Submit a test through your contact form, support form, or any other form on your site. Make sure the submission goes through, you receive the email, and the confirmation message shows correctly.
Forms break more often than you'd think — plugin updates, server changes, email configuration issues. A broken contact form means leads are disappearing without you knowing. Check it every month. Takes 60 seconds.
Pro tip: Use a personal email address for your test submission so you can confirm the auto-reply arrives correctly too.
2. Test Your Page Load Speed
Head to PageSpeed Insights and run your homepage URL. You're looking for a score above 80 on mobile. If it's dropping over time, something changed — a new image that wasn't compressed, a plugin that added bloat, or a hosting issue.
Speed matters more than most people realize. Google uses it as a ranking factor, and visitors abandon slow pages fast. Studies consistently show that a one-second delay in load time reduces conversions by around 7%. That adds up.
3. Click Through Your Main Navigation
Spend two minutes clicking every link in your navigation and footer. Look for broken links, pages that return errors, or anything that redirects incorrectly. It sounds tedious but it's the kind of thing that slips through unnoticed — especially after site updates.
A visitor hitting a dead link or a 404 page loses confidence in your business immediately. Your website reflects your professionalism. Broken links say you're not paying attention.
4. Check Your SSL Certificate
Look for the padlock icon in your browser address bar. If it's missing or showing a warning, your SSL certificate may have expired. This is a bigger problem than it looks — Google flags sites with expired SSL as "Not Secure," which kills trust instantly and hurts your search rankings.
Most SSL certificates renew automatically, but the automation can fail. A quick monthly glance takes two seconds and catches the problem before your customers do.
Watch for this: If you see "Not Secure" in your browser bar, visitors are seeing it too. Fix this immediately — don't wait for your monthly check.
5. Review Your Analytics
Even a five-minute look at your analytics tells you a lot. Check these three things:
- Traffic trend — is it up, down, or flat compared to last month?
- Top pages — what are people actually looking at? Are the right pages getting attention?
- Bounce rate — are visitors leaving immediately on certain pages? That's a signal something needs attention.
You don't need to be a data analyst. You're just looking for obvious changes or problem areas. If something looks off, that's when you dig deeper.
The Full Checklist
Set a recurring reminder on the first of every month. The whole thing takes 15 minutes. It's the kind of small habit that prevents the large headaches — a broken form you didn't catch for three weeks, an SSL warning scaring off visitors, a speed issue tanking your rankings.
If you'd rather have someone else handle it — that's what we're here for. Our hosting and maintenance plans cover all of this automatically.