Post-launch maintenance checklist

Launch is a milestone, not a finish line. A website that isn't maintained slowly degrades—broken links accumulate, plugins go unpatched, content goes stale. This is the ongoing routine that keeps a site healthy long after the launch-day excitement fades.

Weekly or biweekly

Check uptime-monitoring alerts and confirm nothing has gone unnoticed
Skim analytics for anything unusual—a sudden traffic drop, a spike in errors, a form that stopped converting
Review and respond to any spam or moderation queues (comments, form submissions)

Monthly

Apply available software, plugin and theme updates, ideally testing on staging first for anything significant
Check for new broken internal or outbound links
Review Search Console for new crawl errors, manual actions or security issues
Re-run a performance check on key pages and compare against the last check (see the performance checklist)
Confirm backups actually completed successfully—don't assume the schedule ran without checking

Quarterly

Test restoring a backup to confirm it genuinely works, not just that it exists
Review top-performing and worst-performing pages in analytics and Search Console
Audit older content for accuracy—outdated prices, dead links to other sites, superseded information
Re-check SSL/TLS certificate status and security header configuration
Review who has admin access and remove anyone who no longer needs it
Re-check SPF/DKIM/DMARC records are still correct, especially if any email tools changed (see the email deliverability checklist)

Annually (or after any major change)

Do a full re-run of the SEO, accessibility and security checklists, since standards and the site itself both evolve
Reassess whether the site's structure and navigation still reflect current priorities
Review legal pages (privacy policy, terms) for continued accuracy
Re-evaluate hosting capacity against current and projected traffic
Audit dependencies (plugins, libraries, integrations) and remove anything no longer maintained by its provider or no longer actually used

Cost & vendor review

Hosting, tool and service subscriptions tied to the site are reviewed periodically—it's common for a trial or a one-off project tool to keep billing long after it's stopped being used
Each recurring cost is matched to a genuine, current need, not kept on purely out of inertia
Vendor contracts and renewal dates are tracked somewhere visible, so a renewal or a price change isn't discovered as a surprise on the invoice
Alternatives are periodically considered for any tool that's become notably more expensive or less useful than when it was first chosen

Capacity & scaling

Hosting resource usage is checked periodically, not only noticed once the site is already struggling under load
Any known upcoming traffic spike (a sale, a press mention, a seasonal peak) is planned for in advance rather than discovered mid-event
Database and media storage growth is tracked so a slow, creeping resource problem doesn't become a sudden outage

Documentation & handover

Login credentials, DNS access, hosting details and key vendor contacts are documented somewhere the whole responsible team can reach—not only in one person's head
Any custom configuration, non-obvious workaround, or reason something was built a particular way is written down for whoever maintains the site next
If responsibility for the site changes hands, a proper handover happens rather than an informal, incomplete one
A simple written runbook exists for the most common maintenance tasks (deploying an update, restoring a backup, rotating a credential), so they don't depend entirely on one person's memory under pressure

Content freshness

Older, high-traffic pages are periodically reviewed and updated rather than left untouched indefinitely
Genuinely outdated pages are either refreshed, consolidated, or retired with a proper redirect—not just left live and stale
New content additions still follow the standards in the content checklist, not a rushed shortcut version

💡 Put maintenance tasks on an actual recurring calendar reminder rather than relying on memory. The sites that quietly decay are almost never the ones with a written schedule—they're the ones where maintenance was always going to happen "soon."

See the security checklist for backup and update specifics, and analytics & tracking for what to actually look at when reviewing performance data.