How to tell whether a business website still holds up

A quarterly, manual check of a business website costs about 275 euros in owner time per year, according to a calculation on this blog. If that time is spent anyway, it should go toward the checks that actually matter — and each one earns its place on the list for a specific reason.

Test loading speed on a mid-range phone, not the office monitor

A site that looks fast on a wide-screen monitor over office fibre says almost nothing about how it behaves on a customer's phone during a lunch break on mobile data. Photos that look crisp on a desktop screen often weigh several megabytes on a phone and delay the page long enough that the contact form never gets seen. Anyone weighing whether a dedicated app would help mobile visitors more than the website itself can read this earlier piece — for most small businesses, a fast, well-kept website is enough on its own. Skip the mobile test, and there is simply no way to know how many visitors leave before the first tap.

Fill out the contact form yourself

Forms rarely fail with an error message. A plugin update, a changed SMTP setting, or an over-eager spam filter is enough to make enquiries vanish while the site looks entirely normal. The only reliable test is to fill in the form using an address outside the business, then check whether the message actually arrives — including a look in the spam folder. Without this step, a business often only notices the outage once someone remarks that no enquiries have come in for weeks.

Check the SSL certificate and mixed-content warnings

An expired certificate, or a single image still loaded over an unencrypted http address, is enough to trigger a browser warning. For most visitors that's reason enough to leave immediately, regardless of how good the rest of the content is. The check takes minutes through the browser's developer tools: open the security tab, look at the certificate date, then scan the console for mixed-content warnings.

Read the error reports in Search Console

Google's Search Console shows which pages can no longer be crawled, where redirect loops have formed, or whether a manual action has been applied. None of these problems show up on the site itself — they're only visible from the search engine's side. A business can slip out of the index for months without noticing, until enquiries drop and nobody can say why. If there's no account set up yet, doing that first outranks every other item on this list, since it's the only channel that reveals this class of problem at all.

List outdated content and dead links

Last year's price list, a seasonal offer that ended in spring, an internal link to a page that no longer exists — all of it tends to stay put simply because nobody is explicitly responsible for removing it. A customer who calls about an offer that no longer exists costs more staff time than the correction would have. Suppose a six-person trades business had its site built once, three years ago, and never touched it since: there is a good chance the prices reflect two rounds of increases ago, and a seasonal promotion is still listed months after it ended. Neither is visible to anyone who doesn't look at the site from outside on a regular basis.

Actually restore the backup, not just create one

A backup that has never been restored is an assumption, not proof. Some backups run broken for months without any warning appearing, for instance because one database table silently stops being included. This test belongs on a staging copy at least once a year, not on the live site — otherwise the first real test happens during an actual emergency.

Match the cookie banner against what actually loads

Analytics and marketing scripts tend to get installed once and left untouched for years, while both the legal requirements and the business's own tool choices keep changing. A banner still listing a service that was removed long ago, or the reverse — a script loading before consent is given — can only be caught by comparing the banner's settings against the scripts that actually appear in the page source.

Check image file weight

A photo straight off a smartphone camera often runs several megabytes; a properly optimised image of comparable quality is far smaller. Upload the unedited version, and it slows the entire page down no matter how capable the hosting otherwise is. Team photos and project galleries are the usual offenders, since they're updated rarely and reviewed even less.

All eight items can be checked one by one with browser tools, Search Console, and a look at the hosting dashboard — or bundled through the free website check from Log-System Development, which pulls speed, basic SEO signals, and technical fundamentals together in a single run. For a business checking once a quarter, a paid monitoring subscription usually isn't worth the money; the free check covers that rhythm perfectly well. Anyone who wants to turn the results into an actual new site, an AI-supported piece of automation, or an app can work with Log-System Development's developers directly, without an agency markup in between. For very large platforms with an in-house IT team, a specialised systems house is often still the better fit.

Working through all eight points rarely takes more than an hour. The real question is whether that hour is on the calendar — or pushed to "sometime," the way it usually is.