The Mid-Year Website Chores Nobody Does
Quarterly checklists cover the obvious things. This is the other list: the items that are nobody's job, take under an hour each, and reliably cause problems in Q4 when they are skipped.
Prune your user accounts
Open the users list on your website, your host, and your analytics. Remove the intern from two summers ago, the agency you stopped working with, and the three test accounts with administrator rights. Every dormant admin account is an unattended door.
Reconcile your subscriptions
List every recurring charge related to the website: hosting, domain, plugins, themes, email, forms, backups, monitoring, stock photos, chat widgets. Cancel what is unused, note the renewal dates for what is not, and confirm they are all on a company card that will not expire in November.
Delete the plugins you kept just in case
Deactivated is not removed. If you have not needed it in six months, delete it. If you might need it again, note the name in a document and delete it anyway; reinstalling takes two minutes and running it costs you attack surface every day.
Re-point the notification addresses
Form notifications, order receipts, error alerts, and monitoring emails accumulate stale recipients. Send a test through each path and confirm a human receives it. This one check catches more lost revenue than any other item on the list.
Refresh what is visibly dated
- Any page referencing the first half of the year or a finished promotion.
- Team photos and bios after departures.
- The homepage hero image, if it has been the same for three years.
- Case studies and testimonials, which age faster than you think.
Test the recovery path
Restore a backup to staging and time it. Verify the SSL certificate's expiry date rather than trusting the padlock. Confirm your domain is set to auto-renew and that the registrar account is not tied to a personal email.
Then set the reminder
Put this list in your calendar for the first week of January and the first week of July, permanently. The work is small; remembering it is the hard part. Businesses that do it twice a year spend dramatically less time on emergencies than businesses that do it when something breaks.
