The Weekly Five-Minute Website Check Every Business Owner Should Run
Many business owners check their website about as often as they check their smoke detector batteries: once when it’s set up, and then not again until something goes wrong. The site was built, looked good on launch day, and has been left alone ever since, with the business assuming it’s working as it should. The problem is that a website isn’t something you set up once and forget. It’s more like a storefront window, which can get dusty, sun-faded, or end up with a torn poster that no one removes. No one would leave a cracked window unfixed for eight months. Yet many businesses have websites with broken contact forms, phone numbers that are off by a digit, or homepages that take nine seconds to load on a phone, and they don’t realize it because no one has checked.
Here's the case for looking, once a week, for five minutes.
Start by using your own phone, not your computer. More people will find your business on a phone than on a desktop, and a site that looks fine on a laptop can be a mess on mobile. You might see text that’s too small, buttons that are out of place, or a menu that won’t open. Open your site on your phone just like a customer would, and try to do what they would do: find your hours, get directions, or call you.
Check how long your homepage takes to load. If it takes more than a few seconds to appear, many visitors won’t wait. They’ll leave and try the next result. This isn’t just a design opinion; it’s measurable, and it’s one of the main reasons a good business can quietly lose traffic without realizing it.
Make sure your phone number is actually clickable. On mobile, if your number is just plain text and not a link you can tap, most visitors won’t bother. If someone has to write your number down or switch apps to call, some of them simply won’t do it.
Fill out your own contact form. Don’t just read it. Submit it, and make sure the message actually arrives in an inbox someone checks. Forms break more often than people realize, often after a hosting update or a plugin change. They can stay broken for months without anyone noticing, because the only people who would know are the customers who gave up and called a competitor instead.
Search for your own business the way a stranger would. These days, that means checking more than just Google. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overview what they know about your business. These tools use your website, your listings, and what’s said about you online to answer questions before anyone even visits your site. If the answer they give is outdated, incomplete, or wrong, that’s a customer decision being shaped by information you don’t control. You won’t know about it unless you check for yourself.
This is not difficult to do. All it takes is five minutes, a phone, and the willingness to see your business the way a customer does, not just how it looked on launch day.
It’s important to recognize how print, online listings, and websites work together. A print ad or a directory listing often sends someone to your site first. If the site that ad points to is slow, broken, or hard to use on a phone, the money spent on print did its job, but the website undid it. The visitor arrived, but the site needs to be worth the visit.
Most businesses aren’t neglecting their websites on purpose. They built one, it worked, and then life got busy. The five-minute check is about knowing that websites can slowly drift out of date, just like anything left unattended. Especially in today’s age of AI-search. Catching these issues early is easier and less disruptive than hearing from a customer that your site wouldn’t load.
Set aside five minutes on the same day each week to check your own site the way a customer would. If that five-minute check turns up more than you can fix in five minutes, request a free Online Presence Audit and get a second set of eyes on it.
