Your website after launch: the 30-minute monthly check

Every month (about 30 minutes)

• Open your site on your phone and tap every button. Does each one go where it should?
• Send yourself a test enquiry and make a test booking. Did it arrive?
• Check your prices, hours, services and any offers are still right.
• Update your Google Business Profile and reply to any new reviews (see Getting found locally).
• Run your home page through Google PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev).

Every three months

• Check when your domain renews, that auto-renew is on, and that the card on file hasn't expired.
• Check the padlock is showing in the address bar. The security certificates behind it are being made shorter-lived (64 days from February 2027 and 45 days from 2028), so they must renew automatically. Ask whoever hosts your site to confirm they do.
• Remove logins for anyone who no longer works with you.
• If you're on WordPress: confirm backups are running and that you can find the latest one.

Speed, in plain English

PageSpeed Insights gives a score out of 100: 90 and above is good, 50 to 89 needs work, under 50 is poor. It also reports Google's "Core Web Vitals", which boil down to three questions:

• Does the main content appear within 2.5 seconds?
• Does the page respond to a tap within 0.2 seconds?
• Does the layout stay still while it loads, rather than jumping about?

Speed matters because people leave slow pages. Google's research found that as a mobile page's load time goes from one second to ten, the chance a visitor leaves rises by 123%. That research dates from 2017, but the direction hasn't changed. The usual culprits are enormous photos, too many plugins, and videos that play automatically.

Accessibility: making it usable for everyone

The current standard is WCAG 2.2. The Australian Human Rights Commission's guidelines say to meet the latest version, and in the US the Department of Justice says the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to the websites of businesses open to the public. The easy wins:

• Every image has a short description (called "alt text").
• Text contrasts clearly with its background and is big enough to read on a phone.
• Buttons say what they do: "Book a call", not "Click here".

WordPress owners: the extra jobs

• Updates. You can switch on automatic updates for each plugin and theme. Delete plugins you don't use.
• Backups. Back up both the files and the database: weekly for a small site, daily for a busy one, with three to five recent copies kept in different places.