A New Year’s Website Maintenance Checklist

January is the best time to do a teeny bit of website housekeeping. I just finished doing this on my own site and was surprised to find a few broken links, including a link to book a consultation that sent visitors to a form that doesn’t exist anymore! Not super professional, but the truth is that there are a lot of links and buttons and things to keep track of so if I don’t put it on my calendar to do an annual check of these things, they just get missed. 

So, I’m sharing my new year’s website maintenance checklist here so you can find your broken links and clean up your site too. This really is just some quick housekeeping stuff that will probably take you anywhere from 2–20 minutes.

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Here’s the list:

1. Update your copyright 

In the footer of your site you should have a little line of text that says something along the lines of  “©Copyright [year]. Your legal business name. All rights reserved.”

Do you have this? If not, go ahead and add it. 

And if yes, all you need to do is update the year to the current year.

Tip: to get the © symbol, use Option G on a mac or Ctrl Alt C on a PC

2. Check all your buttons and text links (including anchor links)

Go through your site page by page and click on all the links and buttons to make sure they go where you want them to go.

If any of them send you to an 404 error page, fix the link. You can also use https://www.brokenlinkcheck.com to check for broken links.

Tip: make sure that all links to external sites open in a new tab or window. You don’t want to direct people to leave your website because they may forget to come back. If you’re using Squarespace, go to edit a button or link, click on the little gear (settings) icon and make sure “open in new window” is turned on. Like this:

3. Check your forms

Contact forms, employment applications, your mailing list sign up form. Test all these out and make sure they work and are correctly set up. 

It’s also a good idea to check your post submit message (the little message that pops up after someone has filled out a form) just to make sure there’s no outdated info there.

4. Check that SSL is set to Secure:

I mentioned this as a top priority last month too, so if you haven’t done so yet, go to your website right now and look up in the address bar where your website address (url) is. If it shows a little locked padlock symbol and shows “https” before your url, you’re all set. If it says “insecure”, shows a little lock with a slash through it, or just says “http” that means your website is insecure. 

If you’re using Squarespace follow these instructions to set SSL to secure: From your Squarespace main menu go to settings >> advanced >> SSL and make sure your settings look like the image on the right.

And if you have an insecure site on another platform, take a few minutes to look into how to change that. Even if you need to contact customer service, it’s worth it to make this change.

5. Delete old contributors:

Check to see who you have given admin permission to on your site. If there’s anyone on there who you don’t want having access to the backend of your site, delete them. 

From the Squarespace main menu go to settings >> permissions and delete contributors.

6. Turn off or delete old and unused pages

It’s nice to keep things tidy so if you have any old website pages that you’re not going to use anymore or copies of existing pages go ahead and delete them now. And if you’re not sure if you’ll want them sometime in the future, just turn them off so they no longer show up in your navigation or when someone googles your farm.

7. Check your automated emails

If you use e-commerce or send an automated welcome campaign from your email marketing service, take a minute to check those emails and make any necessary updates for the new year.