The 20-minute year-end website checklist
for small businesses

Most small business websites get looked at twice a year: once when something breaks, and once when the owner notices the copyright in the footer still says 2023. Everything else gets handled by whoever built the site, or by nobody. That is how a contact form quietly stops sending, a domain lapses over a holiday weekend, and a "Now Hiring" banner stays up eighteen months after the position was filled.

This checklist is the fix. It is written for the owner, not the developer, and it is meant to be done in one pass with a cup of coffee, a phone, and a laptop. The time estimates are honest. Where a step turns up a problem, write it down and keep moving; the goal of the twenty minutes is to find the problems, not to fix all of them on the spot.

Open a notes app or a sheet of paper. Every item you cannot check off goes on that list. At the end, the length of the list tells you something useful.

1. The basics (4 minutes)

These are the things that take a site offline or make it look abandoned. None of them involve code.

• Domain renewal date. Log into wherever you bought the domain (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google, your developer) and find the expiration date. Write it down. Confirm auto-renew is on and the card on file has not expired. A lapsed domain is the single most expensive avoidable website failure we see.
• Hosting renewal date. Same exercise for the hosting account. If you do not know where the site is hosted, that is the first item on your list; you should know who to call when it goes down.
• SSL certificate. Open your site and click the padlock in the address bar. It should say the connection is secure and show an expiry date in the future. Most hosts renew this automatically, but "most" is not "all," and a browser warning page turns away nearly every visitor.
• Copyright year. Scroll to the footer. If it says anything other than the current year, note it. It is a small thing, but it is the first thing a careful customer notices, and it tells them nobody is watching the site.
• Phone, hours, and address, everywhere. Check the header, the footer, the contact page, and the about page. All four should agree with each other and with your Google Business Profile. If you changed your hours this year, or dropped the office line for a cell, this is where the old version tends to survive.

2. Does it still work? (4 minutes)

A site can look fine and be broken in the one place that matters. Forms and links fail silently; nobody emails you to say your contact form did not go through, because they could not.

• Submit your own contact form. Fill it out as a customer would and send it. Then check the inbox it is supposed to land in, including the spam folder. If nothing arrives within a few minutes, the form is broken, and it may have been broken for months. This is the single most valuable check on this page.
• Click every link in the navigation. Top menu and footer. Each one should land on a real page, not a "404 not found" or a page that was supposed to be taken down. While you are there, click any "Request a Quote" or "Book Now" buttons and make sure they still go somewhere sensible.
• Open the site on your phone. Use cellular data, not Wi-Fi. Scroll the homepage and one service page. Is anything cut off, overlapping, or too small to read? Does the menu open? More than half of your visitors are doing exactly this, and many owners have never done it once.
• Test the tap-to-call. Still on your phone, tap the phone number in the header or footer. It should offer to dial. If it just highlights as text, you are losing calls from people who were ready to make them.

3. Google (4 minutes)

For most local businesses, the Google Business Profile does more for the phone than the website does. It deserves a few minutes at year end, and so does the free tool Google gives you for watching the site itself.

• Hours, including holiday hours. Open your Business Profile and confirm the regular hours match reality. Then set special hours for the holidays you close. Google prompts customers with "hours might differ" warnings when you have not, which reads as uncertainty and costs you visits.
• Photos from this year. Look at the most recent photo on the profile. If it is from a previous year, upload a handful from recent jobs, the truck, the storefront, or the team. Fresh photos are one of the cheapest signals that a business is alive. Our Google Business Profile guide covers what kinds of photos do the most work.
• Respond to every review without a reply. Good or bad, short is fine. A thank-you by name for the good ones; a calm, factual, non-defensive note for the bad ones. Unanswered reviews from months ago are visible to every prospect who reads them.
• Check Search Console. If your site is connected to Google Search Console, open the Pages report and look at two things: the count of pages marked "not indexed," and any red errors. A service page that Google has not indexed cannot rank, no matter how good it is. If you are not set up in Search Console, write that down; it is a ten-minute job for whoever manages the site and it is free.

4. Content (3 minutes)

A year changes a business more than it changes the website that describes it. This is a quick read-through with one question in mind: does the site describe the company we are today?

• Remove services you no longer offer. If you stopped doing residential work, stopped taking small repair jobs, or dropped a product line, every mention on the site is generating calls you have to turn down. Note each one.
• Add the ones you do. The reverse is more common and more costly. You bought a mini excavator and started doing drainage work in March; the website still does not say so, and Google cannot send you drainage customers for a service it cannot find on your site. Each real service deserves its own page.
• Update pricing language. Any "starting at," "free estimates," or specific dollar amounts on the site should still be true. If material costs moved this year and your numbers did not, you are anchoring customers to a price you cannot honor.
• Add one page for the town you did the most work in. Look back at the year's invoices and name the town or county that showed up most. If the website does not have a page about your work there, that is the one new page worth adding this year. A real page, with the kinds of jobs you did, the neighborhoods, and how to reach you, is the most reliable way we know to show up for searches in that town.

5. Speed and security (3 minutes)

You will not fix any of this in three minutes, and you should not try. The goal is to know where things stand and to hand a clear note to whoever looks after the site.

• Run PageSpeed Insights. Go to pagespeed.web.dev, paste your homepage address, and look at the mobile score. Write it down along with the "Largest Contentful Paint" number. Anything above about 2.5 seconds on mobile is costing you visitors and rankings; we explain why in our post on website speed and SEO. You do not need to understand the rest of the report today.
• Updates to the CMS and plugins. If the site runs on WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or similar, log in and look for an updates notice. On WordPress in particular, a stack of pending plugin updates is a security problem waiting to happen. Either run them now, if you are comfortable doing so and a backup exists, or write the count down for your developer. Do not ignore it.
• Backups exist and have been tested. Two separate questions. First, is there a backup of the site somewhere other than the server it lives on? Second, has anyone ever actually restored from it? A backup that has never been tested is a hope, not a plan. If you cannot answer both with a confident yes, it goes on the list.

6. Plan for next year (2 minutes)

The last two minutes are about not being in this exact spot again in twelve months. Three decisions, each small enough to keep.

• Pick a content pace you will actually hold. Two short blog posts a month, or one new service or town page a month. Either is enough to keep Google coming back and to build up pages that rank. The pace matters less than the consistency; a site that adds twelve real pages a year pulls ahead of one that adds twelve in January and nothing after.
• Set up a review ask system. Decide who sends the review link, when, and how. A text the same day the job closes, from the person who did the work, with the direct link. Put it in the job close-out routine so it happens without anyone remembering to do it.
• Decide who owns the site. Someone has to be responsible for renewals, updates, backups, the monthly content, and the check-ups. That is either you, an employee, or a care plan with a company that does it for a living. What matters is that the answer is written down. Our post on what a website care plan includes lays out what the third option covers.

If this took more than 20 minutes, that's the signal

Look at the list you made. If it has two or three items on it and you finished in twenty minutes, the site is in decent shape. Fix the items, put a reminder in the calendar for next December, and get back to running the business.

If the list is long, or you ran out of time in section three, or you could not find the hosting login, or the contact form did not send, that is the signal. Not that the website is bad, but that nobody has been looking after it, and once a year is not enough. Domains expire on their own schedule. Plugins need updates monthly. Reviews arrive whenever customers feel like leaving them. A site that only gets attention at year end will keep producing surprises the other eleven months.

That is exactly what our Website + SEO Care Plan exists for. Hosting, renewals, security updates, tested backups, the monthly content, the profile upkeep, and a plain-English report so you always know where things stand. Everything on this checklist, handled every month rather than once a year, by the same people who build and rank these sites for other Virginia businesses.

And if you are not sure how far off the site is, start with the free website SEO audit. We run a deeper version of sections two through five and send you the findings. If you would like to understand what the audit is looking for first, this post on the ways a website hurts its own SEO is a good place to start. Either way, you will know what needs doing before the new year does it for you.