Spring-Clean Your Website: A 10-Point Health Check for 2026

We give the house a spring-clean. We sort the garden out. The business website? It tends to get left until something breaks.

But a website quietly degrades over time. Links rot, content goes stale, software falls behind, and small annoyances pile up that slowly put visitors off. None of it is dramatic enough to notice day to day — which is exactly why it's worth setting aside half an hour to look properly. Here's our 10-point health check.

1. First Impressions

Open your homepage as if you're a customer who's never seen it. Within five seconds, is it clear what you do, who for, and what to do next? If not, that's the most valuable thing on this list to fix.

2. Mobile Experience

Go through your site on your phone, not your laptop. Most of your visitors are on mobile. Tap the menu, the buttons, the phone number, the contact form. Anything awkward is costing you.

3. Loading Speed

Slow pages lose visitors and rankings. If anything takes more than two or three seconds, dig into why — usually it's huge images or weak hosting. Our Core Web Vitals guide explains what Google measures.

4. Broken Links and Missing Images

Click through your main pages. Broken links and missing images look careless and frustrate visitors. They creep in over time as you change things — a spring check is when you catch them.

5. Out-of-Date Content

Last year's prices, services you've dropped, staff who've left, an events page stuck in 2024. Read every page as a customer and update anything that's no longer true.

6. The Copyright Year

A small thing, but a footer that says "© 2023" silently tells visitors nobody's minding the shop. Update it — and ideally set it to update automatically.

7. Contact Details

Phone, email and address correct and easy to find on every page? Send yourself a test enquiry through the contact form and confirm it actually arrives — and isn't landing in spam.

8. Search Presence

Search your main service plus your town. Where do you appear? If you're nowhere near the first page, that's a project for the months ahead — especially as AI is changing how search works in 2026.

9. Security and Updates

Is your site on HTTPS (the padlock)? Is the software up to date? Are there working backups? If you're not sure, run through our website security checklist.

10. Does It Still Feel Like You?

Businesses grow and change. If your site still reflects who you were three years ago rather than who you are now, it may be time for more than a clean. Here's our take on when a website is due a proper redesign.

What to Do With Your Findings

Don't try to fix it all in one go. Note what you find, then split it: urgent (fix this week), important (plan over the next few months), and tidy-up (when there's time). That short list is a genuinely useful plan — far better than a nagging feeling that the site needs "sorting".

If you'd rather we ran the health check for you, we offer a free website review for UK businesses. Get in touch and we'll give you an honest rundown of what's worth doing.