Five minutes, once a month
Your website usually works quietly in the background — right up until the day something breaks. Most problems are small and quick to fix when they are caught early, and the person best placed to catch them is you, because you know exactly what your site is supposed to do. Here is a simple routine you can run in about five minutes each month.
The five checks
- 1. Does your homepage load? Open your site in a browser. It should appear within a few seconds, with all its images. Scroll to the bottom — is anything missing, jumbled, or showing placeholder text?
- 2. Does your contact form deliver? Fill out your own contact form and send a test message to yourself, with a subject like Monthly Test. If it has not arrived within ten minutes (check your spam folder too), let us know. A broken form loses enquiries silently — nobody complains, the messages just stop coming.
- 3. Does checkout or booking work? If you sell products or take appointments online, walk through the first steps: add an item to the cart, or start a booking. You do not need to complete a real purchase — just confirm the buttons respond and the next page loads without an error.
- 4. Does it look right on a phone? Most visitors see your site on a phone, so check your homepage and one or two key pages there. Watch for text running off the edge, buttons overlapping, or a menu that will not open.
- 5. Anything unfamiliar? Pop-ups you did not add, links to sites you do not recognize, or pages you never created are worth reporting straight away, even if the site otherwise seems fine.
When to open a ticket
Open a ticket if the test email never arrived, checkout or booking showed an error, the phone layout looks broken, or you spotted anything unfamiliar. Tell us which check failed, what you saw (a screenshot helps a lot), and roughly when you noticed it. There is no such thing as a problem too small to mention — small reports are exactly how big problems get prevented.
Spotted something during your check? Open a support ticket and we will take a look.
