Website maintenance checklist for SMEs: weekly, monthly and yearly tasks
What a small business website actually needs to stay fast, secure and visible in Google, broken down into weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly tasks.
By Maruf H., Founder & CEO at Next Innovation Hub · · 2 min read
A website is not finished when it launches. Software ages, plugins get security holes, content goes stale and Google's expectations move on. Most of the broken and hacked sites we take over in Tallinn were fine at launch and then left alone. Here is the maintenance routine we follow, so you can run it yourself or hand it off.
Every week
- Check the site loads and the main forms actually send. Submit your own contact form
- Review uptime alerts and fix anything that went down
- Check for urgent security updates for your CMS and plugins
- Clear spam from forms and comments
Every month
- Apply software, theme and plugin updates, after a backup
- Confirm backups are running and stored off-site
- Look at Google Search Console for errors, broken pages and security warnings
- Check page speed on mobile with PageSpeed Insights
- Review analytics: traffic, top pages and where leads come from
- Update opening hours, prices and team details if anything changed
Every quarter
- Test restoring a backup to a staging site. A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a backup
- Check for broken links and fix or redirect them
- Review user accounts and remove people who no longer need access
- Review your Google Business Profile and make sure the address, phone number and hours match your website exactly
- Refresh one or two key pages with up-to-date content
Every year
- Renew your domain and SSL setup well before they expire
- Review your privacy notice and cookie setup (see our legal checklist)
- Check accessibility against WCAG 2.1 AA basics
- Review hosting: is it still fast and fairly priced?
- Decide what to improve next year based on the data
Signs your website needs help now
- It takes more than three seconds to load on a phone
- You get warnings in Google Search Console
- Your CMS shows a long list of pending updates
- Your contact form has stopped sending emails
- Nobody at the company knows how to log in
Do it yourself or outsource?
If you have someone technical in-house with an hour or two a week, you can run this list yourself. Most SMEs in Tallinn don't, and that is exactly what our website maintenance service covers: updates, backups, monitoring, fixes and content changes for a fixed monthly fee, from a local team you can call. Contact us for a free review of your site.