There is a specific kind of exhaustion that sets in around website launch day. The project took longer than expected, the content was harder to wrangle than anyone anticipated, the feedback cycles went more rounds than planned, and by the time the site goes live, everyone involved is ready for it to be done. The launch is treated as the finish line.
It’s not the finish line. It’s the start of a different phase—one that, if it doesn’t get planned for, tends to result in a site that slowly deteriorates over the following months and years until it’s embarrassing enough to justify another full redesign.
Most of what breaks down in that deterioration is preventable with a small amount of regular attention. This post is the checklist of that attention—what to do in the first weeks after launch and what to build into your ongoing routine.
In the first two weeks after launch
Verify that analytics are working. It sounds obvious, but analytics tracking frequently breaks during site migrations and redesigns, and nobody notices until months later when you realize you have no data. Go into your analytics tool and confirm that traffic is being recorded. Check a few specific pages. Make sure nothing got disconnected during the launch process.
Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console. A sitemap is a file that tells Google about all the pages on your site. Most platforms generate one automatically—on Squarespace it’s at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. Submit it in Search Console under Indexing > Sitemaps. This helps Google find and index your new pages faster.
Check for broken links. Links break during site launches—pages get renamed, URLs change, old content gets removed without redirects. A free tool like Broken Link Checker or Dead Link Checker will crawl your site and return a list of every link that doesn’t resolve correctly. Fix them before they become a problem for visitors or a drag on your search ranking.
Test your forms. Fill out every form on your site and make sure submissions are going where they’re supposed to. Check that you’re receiving the notification emails. Check that the confirmation message the visitor sees is correct. If you had any CRM or email integrations set up, verify that test submissions are flowing through correctly.
Check the site on multiple devices. Look at every key page on a desktop, a tablet, and a phone. Check on both iOS Safari and Android Chrome if you can. Things that look fine on one browser sometimes break on another.
Review your 301 redirects. If you had an existing site before this one, anyone who had bookmarked an old URL—or any site that had linked to you—will hit a broken page unless you’ve set up redirects from the old URLs to the new ones. Most platforms have a redirect manager where you can add these. Check your old site’s analytics for the most-visited pages and make sure those are all redirected.
Monthly
Check your forms again. This sounds excessive but it isn’t. Forms are one of the most common things to break silently—a platform update, an email delivery issue, a configuration change—and most organizations don’t notice until someone mentions that they submitted a form weeks ago and never heard back. A monthly test takes five minutes.
Review your analytics. Not a deep dive—just a quick check of overall traffic trends, which pages are getting the most visits, and whether anything looks dramatically different from the previous month. Sudden drops in traffic can signal a technical problem, a search ranking change, or content that’s been accidentally unpublished. Better to catch it early.
Check for broken links on your most-visited pages. You don’t need to crawl the whole site monthly—just look at your highest-traffic pages and make sure the outbound links on them still go where they’re supposed to. External sites change their URLs, move content, or go offline.
Quarterly
Review your content for accuracy. Programs change, staff turn over, service eligibility shifts, hours and locations update. A quarterly pass through your key pages—services, about, contact, any FAQ content—to verify that the information is still accurate takes less time than you’d think and prevents a common failure mode where someone calls about a program that ended two years ago.
Run an accessibility check. Your platform and any third-party tools it integrates with will update over time, and updates can introduce accessibility regressions. Run your homepage and key pages through the WAVE tool (wave.webaim.org) quarterly to catch anything that’s appeared since your last check.
Check your privacy policy. If you’ve added or changed any tools on your site—a new analytics plugin, a new form tool, a new chat widget—your privacy policy should reflect that. A quarterly review to make sure it accurately describes your current practices takes fifteen minutes and keeps you out of the position of having documentation that contradicts your actual behavior.
Review page speed. Run your homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) and check your mobile score. If it’s dropped significantly from where it was at launch, something may have changed—large images uploaded without compression, a new embedded tool slowing load time, or a platform update that introduced performance overhead.
Annually
Do a content audit. Go through every page on your site and ask: is this still accurate? Is this still relevant? Is there content that should be added? Is there content that’s outdated enough to remove? An annual content audit is the difference between a site that represents your organization accurately and one that gradually accumulates outdated information until it becomes a liability.
Review your platform’s terms and pricing. Website platforms update their pricing and feature sets. Once a year, verify that you’re on the right plan for your current needs, check whether any new features are available that you should be using, and make sure nothing has changed in the platform’s terms that affects how you should configure your site.
Update your staff and login information. Every departure and arrival is an opportunity to leave old credentials lingering. Do an annual review of who has admin access to your site and your analytics account, remove people who have left the organization, and make sure the people who need access have it.
None of this is glamorous. It’s the maintenance work that never quite makes it onto anyone’s priority list because it doesn’t produce anything visible. But it’s also the work that keeps a $10,000 website investment from quietly becoming a $0 asset in three years.
If you want help building a maintenance routine for your site—or if you’re not sure where things currently stand—I’m happy to take a look.