The Small Business Website Maintenance Checklist: Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly and Yearly

A website isn’t finished on launch day. Software goes out of date, hours change, forms quietly stop sending, and a domain renewal email lands in a spam folder. Most website problems aren’t dramatic; they’re small things nobody checked.

This checklist breaks website maintenance into weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly tasks. Adjust the frequency to your site: an online store or a busy booking site needs more attention than a simple brochure site.

How often	Main focus	Typical tasks
Weekly	Is it working?	Phone check, forms, bookings, updates, hours
Monthly	Is it healthy?	Search Console, analytics, every form, content updates, backups
Quarterly	Is it still good?	Speed, broken links, user accounts, restore test, accessibility
Yearly	Is it still right?	Domain, hosting, SSL, policies, photos, content and tool audit

Before you start: know where everything lives

You can’t maintain what you can’t access. Keep a secure record, ideally in a password manager, of:

• Your domain registrar login, and when the domain renews.
• Your hosting login, and when the plan renews.
• Your website admin login (WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace or whatever you use).
• Google Search Console, Google Analytics (GA4) and Google Business Profile access.
• Email provider and any third-party tools: booking systems, forms, newsletters.
• Who your developer or host is and how to reach them.

Make sure these accounts are in your business’s name, not only your former web designer’s. Our security basics explain how to protect each of these logins with two-factor authentication.

Weekly

These are quick checks that catch problems before customers do.

• Visit your site on your phone. Does the homepage load? Do the menu and main buttons work?
• Submit a test through your main form if you get few inquiries, or simply confirm real ones are still arriving. Forms can fail silently.
• Check that bookings or orders are coming through if you take them online.
• Run updates and review backups, if you’re on WordPress and manage the site yourself. Back up first, then update plugins, themes and core, then check key pages. (On Shopify, Squarespace or Wix, the platform handles core updates; review your apps instead.)
• Confirm your hours and any notices are correct for the week ahead, especially around holidays or weather closures.

Monthly

• Check Google Search Console. Look for new errors in the Pages report, any Security Issues or manual actions, and a sudden drop in clicks or impressions. Our Search Console guide explains what each report means.
• Look at your analytics. You don’t need to study every chart. Note which pages get visits, where visitors come from and whether inquiries or bookings are trending up or down. Our GA4 guide for small businesses covers the few reports worth checking.
• Test every form and checkout step, not just the main one: newsletter signup, gift card purchase, quote request.
• Click through your main navigation and calls to action to make sure nothing leads to an error page.
• Review your Google Business Profile and confirm the hours, phone and website link still match your site. Mismatched details confuse customers and search engines alike.
• Update anything time-sensitive: events, specials, seasonal menus, tour schedules, staff changes.
• Check that a recent backup exists and is stored somewhere other than your web server.
• Delete spam comments and form entries, and remove any plugins or apps you’ve stopped using.

Quarterly

• Run a speed check. Test your homepage and one or two key pages in Google’s PageSpeed Insights on mobile. If results have slipped, new images or added scripts are common culprits. See how to check your site’s speed.
• Check for broken links, including links to other sites. Businesses close, booking pages move and partner sites change.
• Review user accounts. Remove former staff and contractors, and make sure each person has only the access they need.
• Test restoring a backup, or ask your host or developer to confirm a restore works. An untested backup is a guess.
• Read your key pages with fresh eyes. Are services, prices you publish, policies and staff bios still accurate?
• Check your site on a few devices: an iPhone, an Android phone, a laptop and a tablet if you have one.
• Run an accessibility check with a free tool like WAVE and fix anything new. Look especially at new images and pages added since the last check. Our accessibility guide explains how to test your own site.
• Look ahead to your busy season. Plan updates to offers, availability and seasonal pages before the rush, not during it. Our peak season checklist covers what to check.

Yearly

• Renew your domain, and turn on auto-renew. Confirm the contact email on the registrar account is one you check. An expired domain can take your website and email offline.
• Review your hosting plan. Is it still fast enough? Does it include backups and current PHP versions? Is the renewal price what you expected? Our guide on how to choose web hosting lists what to compare.
• Confirm your SSL certificate renews automatically and that your site loads only over HTTPS.
• Update legal and policy pages, such as your privacy policy, terms, cancellation or refund policies, so they match how you actually operate. Requirements vary, so check with an attorney if you’re unsure what you need.
• Update the copyright year in your footer, if you show one.
• Refresh your photos where things have changed: a renovation, a new team member, a new menu.
• Review your content. Update older blog posts that still get traffic, combine thin pages, and remove or redirect pages for services you no longer offer.
• Audit your plugins, apps and third-party tools. Are you still using each one? Is each still maintained? Are you paying for anything you don’t need?
• Check that everything still reflects your business. If your services, prices or customers have shifted a lot, it may be time to plan a bigger update.

When maintenance isn’t enough

Regular maintenance keeps a site healthy, but it can’t fix a site built on an outdated foundation. Signs it may be time for more than upkeep:

• Updates regularly break things, or you’ve been told not to update.
• The site is hard to use on a phone.
• You can’t make simple edits without calling someone.
• It no longer describes what you actually do.

In that case, a website redesign can save you ongoing headaches. If you go that route, plan it carefully so you keep the search traffic your current pages have earned. And if you’d rather spend your time running the business, our website care service handles the routine work on this list.