The Yearly Website Audit: A 30-Minute Checkup for Your Website

Websites don't usually die of one dramatic failure. They rot quietly: a form that stopped sending in March, prices from two years ago, a domain drifting toward expiry, pages growing slower each season. A yearly website audit is the cheap defence, thirty minutes with a checklist, once a year, catching the quiet problems while they're still free to fix. Businesses service vehicles annually without debate. The website that brings in enquiries deserves the same ritual. Pick a date you'll remember, maybe just after Tihar when the shop is quiet, and work through this website audit checklist.

Minutes 1 to 5: the expiry dates

Three dates can take you offline, so check them first. Domain expiry: run a WHOIS lookup and confirm both the date and that auto-renew is on. Hosting renewal: log into your hosting account, confirm the billing email is one you actually read and the payment card hasn't expired. SSL certificate: click the padlock in your browser and view the certificate's valid-until date. If any of these lapse, nothing else on this list matters, because nobody will see the site anyway.

Minutes 5 to 10: logins and backups

Attempt to log into everything: hosting panel, WordPress admin, domain registrar, Google Search Console. Discovering a lost password today costs five minutes; discovering it during an outage costs days. Then open your backup tool and check the date on the most recent backup. Not whether backups are configured, whether they're actually running. Silent backup failure is one of the most common findings in every audit we run at WebsNP, and it's invisible until the day it's everything.

Minutes 10 to 15: click your own website

Visit your site the way a customer would, on your phone, on mobile data, not office WiFi. Tap through your five most important pages. Submit your own contact form and confirm the message arrives somewhere a human reads. Call the phone number listed on the site. Check that prices, opening hours, staff names and the copyright year in the footer are current. A 2023 footer whispers "abandoned" to every visitor who notices.

Minutes 15 to 22: speed and search

Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights and note the mobile score; under 50 means visitors on 4G are suffering, and it's worth a conversation with whoever maintains the site. Then search Google for your business name and your main service. Check what shows up: old pages, weird titles, a "this site may be hacked" flag. Open Google Search Console if you have it and look at the Coverage and Security sections. Five minutes here often surfaces what a whole year hid.

Minutes 22 to 27: software and security

Log into your CMS and count the pending updates. A handful is normal life. Forty is a finding. Note your PHP version if the hosting panel shows it, and list any plugins you no longer use, because every unused plugin is an unlocked window. Run your domain through a free scanner like Google's Safe Browsing status page to confirm you're not blacklisted without knowing it.

Minutes 27 to 30: write it down and decide

You'll finish with a short list, usually three to eight items. Sort it into three piles: fix now (expiries, broken forms, security flags), schedule (updates, speed work, content refresh), and delegate. Then decide honestly who does the recurring work, because the audit's most common conclusion is that nobody has been doing it. That's fixable. WebsNP maintenance plans cover updates, backups, scans and small fixes year-round, typically for less than one emergency cleanup costs. And if the audit reveals a site too old to be worth patching, a rebuilt one with free domain, hosting and SSL for the first year may cost less than you'd guess. Either way, put next year's audit in the calendar before you close the laptop. The ritual only works if it repeats.