The First-Monday Website Review Ritual
Websites do not decline because owners stop caring. They decline because nothing on the calendar forces anyone to look. A short, fixed review beats an ambitious one that happens twice a year.
The agenda
- Numbers (10 minutes). Conversions last month against the month before and the same month last year. Organic sessions to your top service pages. Conversion rate split by device. Write the three figures in the same document each month so you build a record.
- Wins and losses (5 minutes). Which page gained the most clicks, which lost the most. One line each on the likely cause.
- Customer path (10 minutes). Load the site on a phone, submit the form, tap the phone number, and check that the notification arrived. Every month. This is the check that catches silent failures.
- Decide one thing (5 minutes). Pick a single change to ship before the next review. One. Not a list.
Why one change
Backlogs of fifteen improvements produce zero improvements. A single change per month is twelve changes a year, each one shipped and observable. If you have a team, the constraint is what makes them prioritize honestly.
Keep the record where others can see it
A shared doc with a dated entry per month becomes institutional memory. When traffic dips next spring, the note from eight months ago explaining that you removed a page or changed a title is the difference between a diagnosis and a mystery.
What not to include
Skip the vanity metrics: pageviews, bounce rate in isolation, social follower counts, and keyword rankings for terms nobody buys from. They generate discussion and no decisions. If a number has never changed what you did next, remove it from the review.
Start this month
Put a recurring 30-minute block on the first Monday of every month, name it after the website, and invite whoever else should care. The discipline is the entire mechanism; the agenda above is just something to fill it with.
