The annual website audit that practically nobody does

There's a strange asymmetry in how small and medium businesses treat their websites. Companies will happily spend a few thousand pounds getting one built, and then - if everything appears to be working - they'll leave it entirely alone for three, four, five years until something obviously breaks or a competitor's site makes theirs look dated.

We see this all the time. A website that was perfectly respectable in 2021 is now slow, full of broken links, running plugins that haven't been updated in eighteen months, and pointing at three social media accounts that no longer exist. Nobody's noticed because nobody's looked. And nobody's looked because there's no calendar entry that says "look at your website".

So here's our suggestion : put one in your calendar. Pick a date, put it in your diary as a recurring annual appointment, and spend a couple of hours once a year actually going through your site properly. Here's what we'd cover.

1. Does it still say the right things?

This sounds obvious, and that's the point - the obvious stuff is what gets missed.

Read your homepage. Read your About page. Read every page in your top-level navigation. Is the company description still accurate? Are the services listed the ones you actually want to be doing more of? Is the "team" page showing two people who left eighteen months ago and missing the three who joined since?

We had a client last year whose website was still advertising a service they'd quietly dropped in 2023. They were getting enquiries for it, having to politely decline them, and wondering why their conversion rate from enquiry to sale was so poor. The fix took ten minutes. The cost of not noticing was two years of wasted enquiries.

2. Click every link in your main navigation

Every single one. Including the social media icons in your footer. Including the "View our latest brochure" link from 2022.

Broken links are embarrassing, they hurt your SEO, and they tell visitors that nobody's minding the shop. They also accumulate silently - a third-party site moves, a PDF gets renamed, a Twitter account gets deleted (or, indeed, rebranded to something else) - and unless you check, you won't know.

If you've got more than about thirty pages, a free tool like Dr Link Check or the link checker in Screaming Frog will save you the manual labour.

3. Check what's actually being updated

If your site runs on WordPress (or any other CMS), log in. Look at the updates panel. How many plugin updates are sitting there pending? When was WordPress core last updated? When was your theme last updated, and is the developer still actively maintaining it?

Out-of-date plugins are the single most common reason small business websites get hacked. Not sophisticated attacks - just bots scanning the internet for known vulnerabilities in old plugins. If you haven't logged in for six months, you're overdue.

While you're in there : how many plugins are actually installed? We've inherited sites with forty-plus plugins, half of which were doing nothing, several of which were duplicating each other's functionality, and a couple of which had been abandoned by their developers years ago. Less is more.

4. Look at your analytics properly

Not just "are visitor numbers up or down". Actually look at the data.

Which pages are people landing on? Which pages do they leave from? Which pages do nobody visit at all (and why are they still there)? Where's your traffic coming from - and has that shifted in the last year? We covered the AI traffic angle in a previous post, but the broader question is whether the channels you're investing in (organic search, paid ads, social, referrals) are actually delivering.

If you don't have analytics set up properly, or you've got it set up but never look at it, that's its own problem - and we'd suggest reading our Master Google Analytics post and then booking a separate hour to fix that.

5. Test it on a phone

Properly test it. Not "glance at it on your iPhone whilst you've got it open anyway". Get your phone out, type your URL in fresh, and try to do the things a customer would do. Find your phone number. Find your address. Submit a contact form. Read a blog post. Look at a product.

Mobile is where most of your traffic comes from for most businesses. It's also where most websites quietly fall apart - text that's too small, buttons too close together, forms that are a nightmare to fill in with thumbs, images that take ten seconds to load on 4G.

If you find yourself thinking "well, it sort of works", that's not good enough. It should work properly.

6. Check your speed

Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights. Run your three most-visited pages through it too. The numbers don't need to be perfect, but they need to be reasonable - and crucially, you need to know whether they've got worse since the last time you checked.

Sites get slower over time. You add a plugin here, embed a video there, install a cookie banner that loads four megabytes of JavaScript before anything else can render, and suddenly your homepage is taking eight seconds to load. People don't wait eight seconds. We wrote about measuring your site's speed as part of our 10 Days series, which is a sensible starting point.

7. Look at the contact methods

When was the last time someone actually sent a test enquiry through your contact form? When was the last time someone rang the number on your site? If you don't know the answer to either of those, do them now.

We've lost count of the number of sites we've audited where the contact form was sending submissions to an email address that nobody monitored, or where the phone number was an old mobile that the previous owner had taken with them, or where the "Get in Touch" button went to a 404. None of those are theoretical - they're all real examples from real businesses, all of whom were wondering why their enquiries had dried up.

8. Ask yourself the awkward question

Last one, and the hardest. Pretend you're a potential customer landing on your site for the first time, knowing nothing about you. Within five seconds of arriving, can you answer :

What does this business do?

Is it relevant to me?

What do I do next?

If the answer to any of those is "not really" or "I'd have to read for a bit to find out", that's not the customer's problem - it's the site's. And it's the kind of thing you stop seeing when you've been looking at your own homepage for three years.

How long does all this take?

If your site's in reasonable shape, two to three hours. If it's been neglected for a while, probably half a day. Either way, it's a tiny investment compared to either (a) the cost of a full rebuild when things have got truly out of hand, or (b) the slow leak of lost enquiries from a site that's quietly underperforming.

Block it out, do it once a year, and your website will repay the favour many times over.

If you'd rather have someone else do the audit for you - someone who'll be honest about what's working and what isn't - drop us a line. We do this for clients all the time, and it's almost always more useful than they expect.