Website maintenance checklist: weekly, monthly and yearly tasks

A website rarely breaks all at once. A form stops delivering, a certificate lapses, a page drops out of Google, and nobody notices for a month. This website maintenance checklist is the schedule we use on website retainers: what to check every week, month, quarter and year, and what goes wrong when each one is skipped. You can run it in-house with an hour or two a month, as long as someone owns it.

01Why a website maintenance checklist needs a schedule

Most maintenance tasks are not hard. They fail because they are nobody's job. A list of "things to keep an eye on" gets read once. A calendar with an owner next to each line gets done.

So split the work by how often it needs doing, put each task in someone's calendar, and keep a short log of what was checked and what was found. The log is what tells you, six months later, when a problem started.

02Weekly website maintenance tasks

These take ten minutes and catch the failures that cost you leads.

• Send a test enquiry through every form and confirm it arrives where it should, including any auto reply
• Check uptime alerts and the hosting dashboard for errors or unusual traffic
• Confirm last night's backup ran, if your platform does not do this for you
• Glance at the analytics for sudden drops in sessions or conversions, which are often a broken tag rather than a real change

The form test matters most. A contact form that silently fails looks exactly like a quiet month.

03Monthly website maintenance tasks

• Open the Page indexing report in Google Search Console and read anything newly excluded or erroring
• Check for broken links and redirect chains, especially on pages that earn traffic
• Apply platform, plugin and dependency updates on a staging copy first, then live
• Review Core Web Vitals in Search Console; our Core Web Vitals checklist explains what to do when a page slips
• Update anything dated on the site: prices, team, events, the year in the footer
• Remove draft and test pages that were published by accident

Updates are the task most often skipped and the one that hurts most when they pile up. Small monthly updates are routine. A year of them at once is a project.

04Quarterly tasks

• Restore test. Restore a backup to a staging site and check it works. CISA's guidance on backing up business data recommends the 3-2-1 rule (three copies, two types of storage, one off site) and testing that you can restore both fully and partially. A backup nobody has restored is a hope, not a backup.
• Content audit. List the pages with the least traffic and decide: improve, merge or remove. Redirect anything you remove.
• Accessibility spot check. Tab through the home page, a service page and the contact form with a keyboard, and run an automated scan. Our website accessibility checklist has the full list.
• Tracking and consent. Check that analytics still records visits and key events, that the cookie banner works, and that the policies still describe what the site actually sets.
• Access review. Remove logins for people who have left, and check that two people can reach the CMS, the domain registrar, the host and the analytics account.

05Yearly tasks

• Domain renewal. Confirm the domain is on auto renew, with a card that will not expire first, and that the registrar account has a current contact email.
• Certificates. Most hosts renew TLS certificates automatically, but check yours does, and that nothing on the site uses a certificate installed by hand. Certificate lifetimes are getting much shorter: under the CA/Browser Forum's Baseline Requirements, the maximum is 200 days from 15 March 2026, 100 days from 15 March 2027 and 47 days from 15 March 2029. Manual renewal stops being realistic.
• Platform version. Check that your CMS, framework and hosting runtime are still on a supported version, and plan an upgrade before support ends rather than after.
• Legal pages. Reread the privacy and cookie policies against what the site does today.
• Bigger picture. Ask whether the site still says what the business does. If the answer is "not really", read how often to redesign a website before starting over.

06Who does what

The left column works well when the site is simple and someone has the time. The "often nobody" rows are why most sites drift. Whatever you choose, write an owner next to every line.

07Signs maintenance has slipped

• Enquiries dropped and nobody can say whether demand fell or the form broke
• The CMS shows a long list of pending updates
• Search Console has email alerts nobody has opened
• Nobody is sure who has the domain registrar login
• Pages still mention last year's events or prices

If several of these sound familiar, start with the weekly list and the access review. They are quick and they remove the biggest risks. If a platform move is on the horizon, our website migration checklist covers keeping rankings through it.

We run this schedule for clients as part of an ongoing way of working after launch. If you would rather hand it over, tell us about your site.