Website maintenance checklist for small businesses
By Nick Crookston, Axeldyne · Updated November 4, 2026
Most small-business websites don’t break dramatically. They decay: a renewal lapses, a button stops working, the hours on the site no longer match the hours on Google. This checklist catches those problems before customers do.
Every week (5 minutes)
- Open your home page on your phone. Does it load quickly and look right?
- Tap your phone number. Does it start a call?
- Check that the main “book”, “order” or “quote” button works.
Every month (20 minutes)
- Submit your contact form and confirm the message arrives (check spam too).
- Click through every menu item and footer link looking for errors.
- Confirm phone, address, email and hours are identical on every page, and match your Google Business Profile and other listings.
- Install updates for WordPress, themes and plugins (after a backup), or check your builder’s notices.
- Look for “Not secure” or certificate warnings in the browser.
Every quarter
- Test page speed with a free tool like Google PageSpeed Insights and compress any huge images.
- Check Google Search Console for pages Google can’t load.
- Remove leftover template text: sample addresses, “lorem ipsum”, placeholder phone numbers.
- Make sure your backups exist and you know how to restore one.
Every year
- Confirm your domain renewal date and that auto-renew uses a card that won’t expire. An expired domain takes down both your website and your email.
- Review who has logins (web designer, former staff) and remove anyone who shouldn’t.
- Update photos, services and prices.
- Check that your page titles and descriptions still describe what you do and where.
What to automate
Uptime, certificate expiry, domain expiry, broken links and contact-info consistency are all checkable by software. That’s exactly what Axeldyne Site Monitor does, so your manual time goes to the things only you can judge.
Check your site in 10 seconds
Our free checker tests HTTPS, load speed, tap-to-call, contact options and leftover template text. Found something? The Axeldyne team can fix it from $99, with a written quote before any work starts and every fix reviewed by Nick Crookston before it goes live.