A contact form can stop sending enquiries and the website will look exactly the same. This website maintenance checklist is built around catching that kind of silent failure before it costs you a month of leads.
Sites rarely break in a way you'd notice
A common story goes something like this. A staff member leaves in March, their mailbox is deleted, and the website form keeps sending enquiries to it. Nobody notices until June, when someone asks why the website has gone quiet.
Nothing looked wrong. The homepage loaded. The form even showed a thank-you message.
Most website problems are like that. A WhatsApp button pointing to an old number. An SSL certificate that expired over a weekend, so browsers now warn visitors the site isn't secure. Visitors don't complain about these things. They leave and contact someone else.
So the website maintenance checklist below is mostly about testing the site the way a customer uses it, from a phone, rather than admiring it from a laptop. You don't need technical knowledge for most of them.
Monthly website maintenance checklist for enquiries
Set a calendar reminder for the first working day of each month. On your own phone, using mobile data rather than office Wi-Fi, run through these:
- Send a real enquiry through every form and check it arrives, including in spam
- Tap the WhatsApp button and confirm it opens a chat with the right number
- Tap the call button and let it ring through to whoever answers
- Read your prices, offers and opening hours against what you charge today
- Look at the first screen of the homepage and check nothing is out of date
Before Ramadan, Eid and the summer slowdown
Seasonal changes catch out more UAE businesses than anything technical.
Ramadan hours and Eid closures need to appear on the website before customers start asking. Ramadan moves earlier by around 11 days each year, so a reminder set for "March" will eventually be wrong. Set it a few weeks ahead of the expected start date instead.
Change your Google Business Profile on the same day. A website saying you open at 10am while Google Maps says 9am is how you end up with an annoyed customer waiting outside a closed shutter. Our Google Business Profile guide covers special hours and holiday closures.
And put the old hours back afterwards. That step gets forgotten surprisingly often.
Every quarter, links, speed and backups
Four times a year, give the site a slightly deeper look.
Run a broken link check. Old blog posts often link to suppliers or partner pages that no longer exist, and your own pages can break when something is renamed. Free online link checkers will crawl a small site in a minute or two.
Check that every page in your main menu still opens, too. A page removed from the site but left in the menu is one of the commonest broken links, and visitors hit it straight away.
Then check speed on a phone. Google's PageSpeed Insights is free, or use our free website checker, which gives a plain-English summary. A sudden drop usually means someone uploaded a huge photo or added a new script.
Backups deserve more than a tick in a box. Ask whoever hosts the site when the last backup ran and whether one has ever been restored. A backup nobody has tested is a hope, not a plan. If you use Google Search Console, glance at it for new errors while you're there.
Once a year, the dates that take a site offline
Plenty of "the website is down" calls have nothing to do with hackers. A domain wasn't renewed, or the card on file expired.
Write down three dates and keep them somewhere more than one person can see. Your domain expiry date. Your hosting renewal date. Your SSL certificate expiry date, if it isn't set to renew itself.
Check who holds the logins for each. If the domain is registered under a former employee's email address or an old designer's account, fix that now, not in the week it expires. Business email usually runs on the same domain, so a lapsed domain takes your email down with the website.
This is also a good point to reread the whole site properly. Team members who've left. Services you stopped offering two years ago. One honest read-through a year catches most of it.
Logins, spam and software updates
A few checks belong to whoever manages the technical side, every month or two.
Go through the list of people who can log into the website, the hosting account and the domain registrar. Remove anyone who has left the business or finished working with you. Former staff and old freelancers with admin access are a bigger risk than most people think, and it costs nothing to tidy up.
Look at what the contact form is receiving. A sudden wave of junk submissions means the spam protection needs attention, and genuine enquiries can get buried under it.
If the site runs on WordPress or another system with plugins, updates need applying and checking afterwards. Custom-coded sites have far less of this, but the server software underneath still gets updated by the host.
Keeping it going after the first month
A website maintenance checklist only works if one named person owns it. Not "the team". One person, with a reminder in their calendar and a short note of what they checked and when.
If that person doesn't exist in your business, you can hand most of it to us. Our Care & support add-on is AED 399 a month and covers text, photo and price changes, backups, security checks and priority WhatsApp support.
One caveat, though. We can only update what we're told about. You'll still be the first to know when your hours change or a price goes up, so a quick WhatsApp from you is part of the routine either way.
To set it up or ask what's covered, call or WhatsApp us on +971 52 292 3875.
Questions people ask
How often should a small business website be checked?
A short check once a month catches most problems. Add a deeper look every quarter and a review of renewal dates and logins once a year.
What breaks most often on small business websites?
Contact forms that stop delivering, often after an email password change or a deleted mailbox. Send a real test enquiry every month to catch it.
How do I find out when my domain expires?
Log into the account where the domain is registered and look for the expiry date, or ask whoever registered it for you. If nobody can get into that account, sort that out first.
Do I need to update my website for Ramadan?
Yes, if your hours, delivery times or offers change. Update the website and your Google Business Profile on the same day so they match.
What does Care & support include?
Text, photo and price changes made by us, backups, security checks and priority WhatsApp support, for AED 399 a month.