By Zach Wennstedt, founder of Eye To Ad Media · 2026-09-29
A website maintenance checklist covers monthly tasks (updates, backups, uptime and form tests, speed and Search Console checks), quarterly tasks (link audit, structured data validation, content accuracy, security scan) and yearly tasks (technical SEO audit, accessibility review, conversion refresh, hosting and license review).
Here is the thing about website problems: they rarely announce themselves. The site still loads. It just loads a little slower, converts a little worse, and ranks a little lower, month after month.
A checklist beats memory. Here is the one we use, split by how often each task matters.
Monthly
- Update the CMS, themes, plugins and dependencies. Test on a staging copy first when you can.
- Confirm backups ran, and that at least one recent backup actually restores.
- Submit every form on the site and confirm the message arrives.
- Check uptime logs and SSL certificate expiry dates.
- Review Google Search Console for new indexing errors, manual actions and Core Web Vitals changes.
- Spot-check mobile speed on your top pages.
- Update anything time-sensitive: hours, prices, promotions, staff.
Quarterly
- Run a full broken link and redirect check.
- Validate structured data on key templates. Our schema validator helps.
- Review robots.txt and AI crawler access with the AI crawler checker.
- Read your top pages as a customer would. Is everything still true?
- Run a security scan and review user accounts and permissions.
- Check internal links for orphans with the internal link graph.
Yearly
- Complete a technical SEO audit.
- Review accessibility against WCAG 2.2, including color contrast and form labels.
- Refresh design and conversion paths based on a year of data.
- Renew and review domains, hosting and software licenses.
- Update your llms.txt and sitemap to reflect the current site.
Or hand it off
If this list looks like a part-time job, that is because it is one. Our website maintenance services cover it, and hand-coded static sites like the ones we build need far less of it to begin with.