The End-of-Quarter Website Checklist

Monthly checks catch what is broken. A quarterly pass catches what is drifting. Set aside two hours at the end of each quarter and work through this in order; almost none of it requires technical skill.

Security and access

• Review every user account on the site, the host, and connected services. Remove anyone who left.
• Confirm two-factor authentication is on for every administrator.
• Rotate shared passwords and revoke unused API keys.
• Check for plugins or themes with no update in over a year and plan replacements.

Recovery

• Restore a backup to staging and time it. Note the duration.
• Confirm backups are stored off-server with adequate retention.
• Verify the SSL certificate's expiry and the domain's renewal date.

Content accuracy

• Prices, hours, staff, service areas, and any seasonal material.
• Expired promotions still live, and last quarter's campaign pages.
• Broken links, internal and external.
• The three pages you edited most recently, proofread properly.

Performance and measurement

• Run a speed test on your homepage and your busiest template, on mobile.
• Verify conversion tracking still fires by completing a form and a call link yourself.
• Compare the quarter's conversions and organic sessions against the previous quarter and the same quarter last year.
• Note the biggest gainer and the biggest loser among your landing pages, with a one-line theory for each.

Decide the next quarter's one improvement

Not a list. One thing, chosen from what the numbers showed, scheduled with a date. Sites improve through twelve shipped changes a year, not through four ambitious plans that stall in week two.

Write down what you found

Keep the results in the same document each quarter. Over two years it becomes the history that explains why traffic moved, what you tried, and what worked, which is information no analytics tool can reconstruct for you.