Websites do not fail dramatically. There is no morning where the site falls over and forces you to deal with it. They rot quietly instead: a price that changed in March, a member of staff who left in June, a link to a supplier who closed, a contact form that has been quietly failing for eleven weeks.
The owner is always the last to know, because the owner never uses their own website like a stranger does.
The ten-minute monthly pass
Put it in the calendar on the same day every month. Open the site on your phone, not the computer you built it on, and check the things that go out of date on their own.
- Facts that change. Prices, opening hours, staff names, the services list, anything seasonal. This is where most of the rot is.
- Send yourself a message. Fill in your own contact form and wait for it to arrive. Do this every month without fail, because a broken form is silent and expensive, and it usually breaks when something else was changed. If yours is drowning in rubbish instead, stop contact form spam is the fix.
- Click your own main links. The buttons that matter: book, buy, contact, the menu, the phone number. Tap the phone number on a phone and confirm it dials.
- Look at one page as a stranger would. Pick a different page each month. You will notice something you have been blind to for a year.
Ten minutes. Set a recurring reminder now rather than intending to remember.
The quarterly hour
Four times a year, sit down properly with the boring half.
- Run a health check. Something automated that reads the site the way a search engine does and lists what is wrong. Our free website checker does it for any address on any platform, and what a site health score measures explains what the findings mean.
- Look at what people actually did. Not visitor counts. Which pages they landed on, which they left from, what they searched for on the way in. What to measure on a small business website is the short list that matters, and where website visitors drop off is what to do about it.
- Delete something. Almost every site carries pages nobody has visited in a year. They dilute the site and give you more to maintain. Remove them, or merge them into a page that is working.
- Check the paperwork. Privacy policy still accurate, cookie banner still doing what it claims, legal pages still true. See the legal pages your website needs.
- Renew what expires. Domain, and the card attached to it. This is the one that ends businesses, and it takes ninety seconds to confirm.
The jobs you should not be doing at all
If you are personally doing any of the following on a hosted platform, you are paying for something you are not receiving:
- Applying software or security updates
- Taking backups
- Renewing or installing security certificates
- Fixing the site because an add-on broke another add-on
- Making pages work on a new phone size
These are the platform's job. This is most of the difference between a hosted builder and running your own installation, and it is the whole of what people mean when they say a self-hosted site is cheaper until you count the evenings. Website builder versus hiring a developer sets out where that line falls.
How to hear about problems before your customers do
The monthly pass catches slow rot. It will not catch a form that broke on Tuesday. Two habits close that gap:
- Make the confirmation come to you as well. Every enquiry, booking and order should copy an inbox you read. Silence then becomes information.
- Ask, once. "How did you find us, and did the site work?" asked of one customer a month will tell you more than any dashboard, and it costs nothing.
The realistic version
Nobody keeps this up perfectly. If you do nothing else, do two things: test your own contact form once a month, and confirm your domain renewal once a year. Those two cover the failures that actually cost money. Everything else on this page is improvement, and improvement can wait for a quiet Tuesday.
Frequently asked questions
What website maintenance does a small business actually need?
Ten minutes a month: correct any facts that have changed, send yourself a message through your own contact form and confirm it arrives, tap your own main buttons and phone number on a phone, and read one page as a stranger would.
How often should I update my website?
Monthly for the facts that go stale on their own, such as prices, hours and staff. Quarterly for the longer pass: a health check, what visitors actually did, deleting pages nobody reads, and confirming the legal pages are still true.
Do I need to do security updates on a website builder?
No. On a hosted platform, software updates, backups, security certificates and keeping pages working on new phone sizes are the platform's job. If you are personally doing any of those, you are paying for something you are not receiving.