Most website problems don't appear suddenly — they build up gradually, and by the time they become noticeable on their own, they've usually already cost the business several months of missed leads. Below are seven items that take half an hour a month at most to check, and save far more than that.

1. Does the inquiry form and call buttons actually work. Check it yourself: fill out the form the way an ordinary visitor would and confirm the inquiry actually arrives — to your email, your CRM, wherever it's supposed to go. Forms sometimes stop sending after a site update or a hosting change, and nobody finds out for weeks, because the form still looks perfectly normal.

2. Are the prices and terms up to date. Services change, promotions end, and a page can go on showing what was current back when the site launched for years. Once a month it's worth going through the key pages and checking that what's written matches what you're actually selling now.

3. How the site opens on a phone. Not in theory «responsive design is set up», but in practice — open the site from your own phone and try to reach the inquiry form the way an ordinary visitor would. Small visual bugs on the mobile version are found exactly this way, not through the admin panel.

4. Load speed. One free test through PageSpeed Insights a month is enough. Speed can drop over time on its own — because of new plugins, growing image sizes, accumulated unoptimized files — even if nobody deliberately touched the code.

5. Are there any new errors in Google Search Console. Broken links, pages that dropped out of the index, crawl errors — Search Console shows all of this for free and in real time. Checking once a month lets you catch these issues before they've had time to affect search rankings.

6. The date of the last backup. Not «was backup ever set up at some point», but specifically: when was the last working copy made, and can it actually be restored if needed. A month-old backup at the moment of a real failure isn't a guarantee anymore — it's a lottery.

7. CMS and plugin updates. The list of available security updates is worth checking regularly, rather than waiting for them to pile up into a critical mass and turn the update into a separate, risky project. The more frequent the small updates, the calmer the transition between versions.

Seven items, thirty minutes a month — and most typical website problems get caught at the «minor glitch» stage, instead of the «a client wrote in saying the site hasn't worked for a week» stage.

If checking all of this yourself isn't something you want to do, or there just isn't time — tell us about your site through the «Discuss a Task» form, we'll take these items on as ongoing support, and you'll get a report instead of doing the checks by hand.

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