Your Website's Annual Physical: A 10-Point Checklist
Websites decay in slow motion. Nothing breaks loudly; things just gradually stop being true. Once a year, block two hours and go through this.
1. Is everything you say still accurate?
Team members who've left. Services you no longer offer. Prices from two increases ago. Hours that changed. Awards from 2019 presented as current.
Read your homepage, about page, and service pages as if you were a customer. Fix what's false first — it's the only category on this list that actively misleads people.
2. Do all your links still go somewhere?
Internal links to pages you deleted, external links to companies that were acquired or shut down, a partner logo linking to a domain now serving something unrelated. Run a crawler over the site and check the list.
3. Does the contact path work end to end?
Submit your own form. Confirm delivery. Call your own listed number. Email your own listed address. Check that the address on your contact page is where you actually are.
4. Are the backups real?
Not "are backups configured." Restore one, somewhere that isn't production, and confirm the result is a working site with current content.
5. Who controls the domain?
Registrar, renewal date, payment method, and whether the account is accessible to someone still with the business. Five minutes, and it's the difference between an inconvenience and a catastrophe.
6. What's installed that shouldn't be?
Plugins, integrations, and third-party scripts. For each, name what it does for the business this year. Remove what fails the test — including deactivated plugins still sitting on disk.
7. How fast is it, on a phone, on cellular?
Not on your laptop on office Wi-Fi. Check field data if you have it. Compare against last year: speed decays as content and tags accumulate, and the decay is invisible until it's severe.
8. What does Search Console say?
Coverage errors, pages dropped from the index, a sudden fall in impressions for a page that used to perform, security notices. Most of this arrives by email to an address nobody reads, so look directly.
9. Is anything expiring?
SSL certificate, domain, premium plugin licences, service subscriptions, API keys and integration tokens. Put every renewal date in one calendar with a reminder a month ahead.
10. Does it still describe the business you have now?
The hardest one. Businesses change faster than their websites — new focus, better clients, a service that became the main event.
If your site describes what you were doing three years ago, everything else on this list is maintenance on the wrong building.
What to do with the results
You'll finish with a list. Sort it: broken things, false things, slow things, everything else. Do the first two categories this month. Schedule the third. Ignore the fourth until next year.
Then put a note in the calendar for twelve months' time, because the single greatest predictor of a healthy website is that somebody looks at it on purpose, on a schedule.