The Mid-Year Website Check-Up: 7 Things to Audit Before Q3
We're halfway through the year. The first half got away from most of us a little faster than expected, and your website has probably been running quietly in the background the whole time — doing its job, or at least appearing to.
That last part is worth pausing on. A website can look completely fine on the surface while something underneath has quietly stopped working: a form that no longer delivers, a page that's gotten slow, content that's three offerings out of date. None of it announces itself. You just slowly stop getting the results you used to.
June is a good, low-stakes moment to check. Here are seven things worth an hour of your time before the second half of the year picks up speed.
1. Test Every Contact Form
Start here, because it's the one with the most direct line to revenue and the most common silent failure.
Go to your own website like a stranger would, fill out each form — contact, quote request, newsletter, anything — and confirm the message actually lands in the right inbox. Check spam and promotions folders too. A form that submits successfully but never delivers is the most expensive problem on most small business sites, precisely because nothing about it looks broken.
If you only do one thing on this list, do this one. We wrote a whole piece on why forms break without anyone noticing if you want the deeper version.
2. Run a Speed Check
Slow sites lose visitors and rank worse, and a site that was fast a year ago can drift as content, images, and scripts pile up.
Run your homepage and one or two key pages through Google PageSpeed Insights. Look at the mobile score first — that's where most of your traffic is and where problems show up. If you're below 50 on mobile, something fixable is dragging it down, usually oversized images or too many scripts. Our plain-English guide to Core Web Vitals breaks down what the numbers actually mean.
3. Hunt for Broken Links
Links rot. Pages you linked to get deleted or renamed, you restructure your own site and forget what pointed where, a tool you embedded changes its URL. Every broken link is a small dead end for a visitor and a small ding to your SEO.
A free crawler like Google Search Console (which flags them automatically) or a quick run through a broken-link checker will surface them in minutes. Pay special attention to links in your main navigation and your most-visited pages — those are the ones that actually cost you.
4. Update What's Out of Date
Spend ten minutes reading your own site as if you'd never seen it, and flag anything that no longer matches reality:
- Services or products you no longer offer — or new ones you've added but never listed
- Pricing that's changed
- Staff or team members who've come or gone
- Hours, location, or contact details
- That copyright year in the footer (a small thing, but a stale one quietly signals "nobody's minding this site")
- Any "new!" or "coming soon" that stopped being either months ago
Out-of-date content does real damage: it erodes trust with the exact prospects who are checking you out before reaching out.
5. Look at Your Analytics
You're halfway through the year, which means you finally have enough data to see patterns rather than noise.
Open Google Analytics (or whatever you use) and ask a few simple questions: Which pages actually get traffic? Where do people land, and where do they leave? Is anything you spent real effort on getting ignored? You don't need to become a data analyst — you're just looking for the obvious signal. If your most important page barely gets visited, that tells you where to focus the second half of the year.
6. Confirm Backups and Security Are Actually Working
This is the boring one that becomes the only one that matters on the day something goes wrong.
Confirm three things: backups are running, they're stored somewhere separate from your site, and they actually restore (a backup nobody has ever test-restored is a guess, not a safety net). On the security side — especially if you're on WordPress — make sure updates are happening and nothing looks off: no admin users you don't recognize, no unexpected redirects, no warnings in Search Console.
If you can't confidently answer "yes, this is handled," that uncertainty is exactly what a website care plan exists to remove.
7. Use Your Site on Your Phone
Last, the simplest check, and the one most people skip: pull up your website on your actual phone and use it like a customer would.
Tap through the menu. Try to find your phone number. Fill out a form. Read a paragraph. Most of your visitors are doing exactly this, and problems that are invisible on a desktop — text too small, buttons too close together, an image that pushes everything off-screen, a popup you can't close — are obvious the moment you're holding the thing in one hand.
That's It
None of this is complicated, and the whole pass takes about an hour. The point isn't to overhaul your site — it's to catch the small, silent problems while they're still small, instead of discovering them when a customer does.
If you go through this and find a few things you'd rather not fix yourself — or you'd simply rather have someone keep an eye on all of it year-round so you never have to run this checklist again — that's what we do. Either way, an hour spent now is a good investment in the second half of your year.