All of us here at Gallagher Website Design want to wish you a happy and prosperous New Year!

If you really want to start the year off with a bank, you should make sure your website is up to date.

To help you achieve that, I’ve created a yearly website maintenance checklist for you.

Each of the items on this checklist is essential to maintaining and operating a successful website for 2021.

You can download / view the checklist here:

Yearly Website Review Checklist

Our checklist covers three (3) major areas of your website.

1. Website Infrastructure
2. Legal Requirements
3. Content Updates

I’ve found most website owners don’t review their website yearly and therefore fall behind in critical areas.

Website Infrastructure

One of those areas that gets overlooked is website infrastructure. To start with, many website owners don’t have a backup copy of their website.

Also, due to the average website owner not being technically knowledgeable, they don’t secure and keep up with their website infrastructure.

The result can be devastating. I’ve seen many businesses lose their website seemingly overnight.

It’s heartbreaking, especially when the website or domain name can’t be recovered.

Legal Requirements

On the legal side, most business owners don’t realize they are at risk.

There are many legal aspects to owning and operating a website that your average website owner doesn’t know.

For one, you need to have a privacy policy. It’s legally required by several states, including California, even if you don’t do business in that state.

Here is a list of states currently requiring a privacy policy as of January 1st, 2020.

1. California
2. Nevada
3. Vermont
4. Delaware
5. Oregon

For more information about each state’s exact laws, rules, and guidelines, you can review this document on State Laws Related to Internet Privacy that was compiled by an official government agency (National Conference of State Legislatures).

Content Updates

Another big area to review yearly is your website’s content.

Many businesses hire and fire employees in a given year but forget to remove and add employees to their team and about pages.

Likewise, if your services or products have changed, you should make sure your website reflects these changes.

Additionally, there are several other areas that should be reviewed yearly. Such as broken links on your site, does your site look okay on the latest mobile devices, are your plugins and WordPress up to date, etc.

Need Help With Our Website Maintenance Checklist?

If you want us to do this checklist for you, send us a message through our contact form, and we’ll discuss it.