There are a handful of website updates worth making now, before September arrives and everyone suddenly gets busy again. August has a particular quality to it. The phone rings a little less, the inbox is quieter, and half the people you need decisions from are somewhere with better weather. It is frustrating if you are chasing work, but it is genuinely useful if you have a website you have been meaning to tidy up.
We are not going to pretend that any of the five jobs below will transform your business. They will not. What they will do is tighten things up, remove a few small points of friction, and mean that when enquiries start coming through again in September, your site is not quietly working against you. Most of them can be done in an afternoon by someone reasonably confident with their own CMS, which is exactly who this post is written for.
This sounds too obvious to include, and it is the one we find wrong most often. Phone numbers that changed two years ago. An email address routing to someone who left. Opening hours that were updated for Christmas and never changed back. A contact form quietly failing because a plugin updated and the notification address got dropped.
Go through every page that carries a contact detail, not just the contact page. Check the footer, the header, any landing pages, and your Google Business Profile while you are at it. Then actually submit your own contact form and confirm the email lands somewhere a human reads. It takes twenty minutes and it is the single most expensive thing to get wrong.
Site speed matters more than most business owners expect, particularly on mobile where a lot of your September traffic will come from. Google’s PageSpeed Insights gives you a free report on any page of your site, along with a prioritised list of what is slowing it down.
You will not be able to action all of it, and you should not try. Ignore anything that sounds like it needs a developer. Focus instead on the two or three things you can fix yourself, which are almost always the same culprits. Oversized images that were uploaded straight from a phone or a camera. Plugins you installed once, stopped using, and never deactivated. Video files hosted directly on the site rather than embedded from elsewhere. Compressing your largest images alone will usually shift the needle, and Google’s own guidance on page experience is worth a read if you want to understand what it is actually measuring.
Every site accumulates content that has aged badly. A services page listing something you no longer offer. A team page featuring someone who left. A case study from 2019 sitting at the top of your work section. A blog post referencing an event that has been and gone.
Pick three or four pages that get the most traffic and read them properly, as a first-time visitor would. Not skimming, actually reading. You will spot things you have stopped noticing because you see them every day. If the writing describes a version of your business that no longer exists, that is worth half an hour of your time now rather than in October when you are flat out.
This is the least interesting job on the list and the one that saves you the most grief. Take a full backup of your site, files and database, and store it somewhere that is not the same server as the site itself. If your hosting includes automatic backups, log in and confirm they are actually running, because “included” and “working” are not the same thing.
While you are in there, check the renewal dates on your domain and your SSL certificate. An expired domain is a genuinely bad week. An expired SSL certificate throws a security warning at every visitor, which in September is precisely the moment you do not want it happening. Set a calendar reminder for both, a month ahead of the date.
Log in, look at what is out of date, and update it. Backup first, which you have just done, then work through the list. Most updates are small security patches and go through without incident.
The caveat is worth stating plainly. Occasionally an update breaks something, usually where a plugin and a theme disagree with each other. If your site is running an older theme or a stack of plugins that have not been touched in years, this is the point where a quick win can stop being quick. If that describes your setup, it is better to know it now, in August, than to find out during a busy week.
Not strictly a website update, but it sits close enough to be worth doing in the same sitting, and it is the one most business owners set up once and never look at again.
Log in and check the basics. Opening hours, particularly if anything changed over summer. Phone number and website URL. Services listed, and whether they still match what you actually sell. Then look at the photos, because a profile carrying images from four years ago tells a visitor something you probably did not intend.
Two things beyond the basics are worth five minutes each. Reply to any reviews you have not responded to, including the good ones. And post an update, which most businesses never do at all. For a lot of local searches your Google Business Profile is the first thing someone sees, and quite often the only thing, so it is worth the same attention as your homepage.
The honest limit of a list like this is that it treats maintenance as something you do occasionally, when you remember and have the time. That works until it does not. Sites tend to drift gradually rather than break dramatically, and by the time something obvious goes wrong there is usually a backlog of small neglected things behind it.
That is the thinking behind our support packages , which cover security, maintenance and updates every week of the year rather than whenever someone gets round to it. It means the five jobs above are simply happening in the background, and you are not spending an August afternoon on them at all.
If working through this list has made it clear that the problem is not really maintenance, that the site itself is dated or fighting you every time you try to edit it, that is a different conversation. Our web design and development team can talk you through what is worth rebuilding and what is worth leaving alone, and we are happy to say when the answer is the latter. Either way, get in touch and we will give you a straight answer before September gets going.
