A practical website maintenance checklist
What to review to understand your website’s technical health.
Start with availability
Open critical pages on mobile and desktop. Check the home page, products, forms and payment flow in a test environment. Record the time, device and reproduction steps for any issue. Monitor response content too: HTTP 200 does not guarantee a working page.
A backup needs a recovery test
Identify what is backed up, where it lives and who can access it. Keep copies separate from the live server. Restore into an isolated environment to check that database, files and configuration match. Record recovery time and the data gap between backups.
Turn the review into a schedule
Schedule reviews of patches, administrator accounts, domain renewals and SSL certificates. Each item needs an owner, evidence and a response when it fails. Frequency depends on the system’s rate of change, data and risk.