Website care checklist
What to check every week, month, quarter and year so your site stays up, safe, fast and current.
Every week, check the site loads on a phone, send a test through each form, and confirm updates and backups ran. Every month, review users, plugins, security, speed, Search Console and your content. Every quarter, test a restore. Every year, check renewals, contact details and access, and whether the site still fits the business.
Free, with no sign-up. Last updated October 31, 2026. Prints on US Letter. Tagged for screen readers, with real text and bookmarks, and every checklist item links to the page on e-3design.com that explains it.
What's inside
- What to write down before you start: where the domain, hosting, site and email live
- Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly checks, each with a link to the full how-to
- What to do when a check fails, and how fast
- A log page to record what you checked and fixed
The guides behind it
- What should I check on my website, and how often?Every week, check the site loads on a phone, send a test through each form, and confirm updates and backups ran.
- Website basics for owners: the complete guideA healthy small-business website rests on a few basics: a domain the business owns and renews automatically, DNS and hosting you can name, HTTPS everywhere, pages that work quickly on phones and for people with disabilities, tested updates, backups you've restored at least once, and monitoring that tells you when something breaks before customers do.
- What does website maintenance actually include?Real website maintenance covers four jobs: tested updates to WordPress, themes and plugins; backups you can actually restore; monitoring for downtime and security problems; and quick fixes and small edits.
- Set up uptime, SSL and domain monitoring for your siteHave a monitor load your home page and your contact or booking page every few minutes from more than one location, and check for a word that only appears when the page works.
More free checklists
- Website launch checklistCheck a new website in three passes: the week before, launch day and the week after.PDF, 5 pages
- Before you hire a web designerThe questions to ask any web company, what a good answer sounds like, and the red flags.PDF, 6 pages
- Google Business Profile checklistSet up, verify and keep the free listing customers see on Google Search and Maps.PDF, 6 pages
- Email deliverability checklistSPF, DKIM and DMARC set up in the right order, plus the senders people forget.PDF, 6 pages
- What 7,500+ website support requests taught usAbout 7,600 small-business support requests, 2017 to 2026: what people ask for, what breaks, how fast it's fixed and what prevents it.PDF, 5 pages
Rather we did it for you?
Everything in these checklists is something we do for clients every week. Call, or start with a free website check.