A mid-year website check-up: the things worth looking at right now

We are halfway through the year. Somewhere in the last six months you changed your hours, added a service, dropped one, ran a promotion, hired someone, maybe raised your prices. Your website, meanwhile, has been sitting quietly at the same address the whole time, saying whatever it said in January to every person who looked you up. The question worth asking in July is simple: is it still telling the truth, and is it still doing its job?

A website is not a "set it and post it once" thing. It drifts out of date the same way a bulletin board does, a little at a time, until one day a customer calls to book something you stopped offering months ago. The good news is that catching all of that does not take a redesign or a developer. It takes about twenty minutes, a phone, and a willingness to look at your own site the way a stranger would.

Here is the mid-year check-up I would run. Grab a coffee and go down the list.

1. Is everything on it still true?

This is the big one, and the one owners miss most, because you never look at your own "About" page. Read your site top to bottom as if you were a new customer and fact-check it against your business today:

• Hours, including any seasonal or holiday changes. Wrong hours send people to a locked door, and that is the fastest way to earn a bad review you did not deserve.
• Services and products. Everything you offer is listed, and nothing you stopped doing is still on there inviting bookings.
• Prices, if you show them. Anything that went up in the last six months should say so.
• People. New team members added, anyone who left taken down.
• Contact details. The phone number, email, and address are the ones you actually use right now.

If a customer could act on something old and get burned, fix that first.

2. Does it still load quickly?

Speed slips over time as pages pick up more photos and add-ons. Open your homepage on your phone, on regular cell data rather than your home wifi, and count. If it is not showing something useful in about three seconds, you are losing people, because a slow site quietly reads as a neglected one. Oversized images are the usual culprit, and they are one of the easiest things to fix.

3. Is it still clean on a phone?

Most owners only ever see their own site on a desktop, but most of your visitors are on a phone. Pull yours out and actually use the site: tap the menu, read a paragraph, try to find your phone number, try to send yourself a message through the contact form. Watch for text that runs off the edge, buttons too small to tap, and anything you have to pinch and zoom to read. If it fights you, it is fighting your customers too. There is a full walk-through in the five-minute phone test.

4. Is there still one clear next step?

Look at your homepage and ask what you actually want a visitor to do. Call? Book? Message you? Now check that the page makes that one action obvious, above the fold, without hunting. Sites tend to accumulate buttons over time until the important one gets lost in the crowd. If everything is shouting, nothing is heard. This is your homepage's one job, and it is worth protecting.

5. Does the browser still trust it?

Look at the top of the browser when your site is open. You want a little padlock and a web address that starts with "https." If instead you see the words "Not secure," that is your browser warning visitors about your own site, and it will scare people off before they read a word. Security certificates can lapse, so this is worth a glance every few months. It is one of the quiet trust signals a stranger reads without knowing they are reading it.

6. Do the small details give away your age?

These are the little cracks that make a real, active business look abandoned:

• The footer year. If it says a copyright year that has already passed, it tells every visitor nobody has touched the site lately. (A well-built site rolls this over on its own. If yours does not, note it.)
• Photos. Are they current, and are they actually yours? A season-old promo banner or generic stock photos that could be anyone both chip away at trust.
• Leftover placeholder text or dead links. Click your main links and make sure they all still go somewhere. Fix the ones that do not.

None of these are expensive. They are just easy to stop noticing on your own site.

7. Can people still find you?

Your website is only half of showing up online. The other half lives on Google. Take five minutes and search your own business name, then search the way a stranger who has never heard of you would ("plumber in Tooele," whatever fits). Check that:

• Your Google Business Profile still has the right hours, phone, and photos, since that panel is doing half your marketing.
• Any new reviews got a reply.
• You are turning up at all for the searches that matter, which is the whole point of showing up on Google.

8. Do you actually know if it is working?

Here is the honest one. Most small business owners have no idea whether anyone visits their site, or what those visitors do when they get there. You do not need to become an analyst, but knowing roughly how many people came this month, and whether that number is going up or down, turns your website from a mystery into a tool you can steer. If you have never looked, that is a fine thing to set up this month. (I will dig into what is actually worth watching in a future post.)

How I think about it

If several of these turned up something to fix, that is completely normal. A website is a living thing, and living things need tending. None of this list requires a rebuild. It is maintenance, the website version of checking the oil.

This is also exactly the kind of look I give a business before I ever talk about building anything. I start with research, not a requirements list, and hand the owner a plain, graded report on where their current site stands, including most of the points above. If you run this check-up and the list of "fix that" gets long, or you would rather someone just handle it, that is a good conversation to have. You can see a few small business sites I have built or start a project.