Website maintenance checklist for business-critical sites

Organise website maintenance around critical journeys, recoverable backups, controlled updates, access reviews and evidence of completed work.

Website maintenance is the recurring work that keeps a business service usable, recoverable and supportable. It is broader than updating packages or checking whether the homepage returns a response. Start with the journeys that matter: enquiry submission, checkout, account access, booking or content publishing. Assign an owner and a verification method to each one, then choose maintenance intervals based on change and impact.

Check service behaviour

Use suitable monitoring for availability and critical journeys, with alerts directed to someone who can act. Inspect failed form submissions, checkout errors and broken integrations rather than relying only on server uptime. Review certificate and domain renewal arrangements. Confirm that contact details, legal information and important landing pages remain current. A technically available site can still lose business because a form routes messages to an abandoned inbox.

Maintain the change and recovery path

Inventory the application, dependencies, hosting and third-party services. Review updates for compatibility and security relevance, test them in a representative environment and keep a rollback plan. Verify backups by restoring a sample or exercising the documented recovery procedure. Record the data covered, retention and restore ownership. A completed backup job is useful evidence of execution, but it does not establish that the team can recover the required service.

Use a recurring operating checklist

• Review access and remove obsolete accounts, tokens and vendor permissions through the agreed process.
• Inspect errors, capacity trends and failed background jobs, then create prioritised corrective work.
• Test important forms, integrations and transactional journeys after changes.
• Record completed work, known risks, pending updates and the next review owner.

Make the maintenance report actionable

Report what was checked, what failed and what remains unresolved. Separate routine work from new feature requests so neither disappears into a vague support allowance. Tie priority to business impact and exposure, not just a plugin’s update badge. Review whether the site’s operating needs have changed as traffic, integrations or sales channels grow. The useful output is a short evidence trail and a manageable backlog, supported by a team that knows how to release, diagnose and restore the site when needed. Keep each recurring check attached to a named owner and a visible completion record.

• Maintenance and support →
• Software Support SLA: Response, Resolution and Exclusions →
• Software Handover to a Maintenance Team: An Acceptance Checklist →