Website Maintenance Checklist for Client Sites

A client website can be online and still have a broken contact link, an expiring domain, or an email authentication record changed by another vendor. A website maintenance checklist gives freelancers and agencies a consistent way to catch those problems and record who will fix them.

Use this checklist as a starting point for each client site. Adjust the schedule to the site’s risk, traffic, contract, and platform; a busy checkout may need closer attention than a small brochure site. Monitoring helps surface changes, but it does not replace testing, backups, or a person responsible for fixing the issue.

Set up a client-site inventory

Before choosing tools or a schedule, record the information needed to respond when something breaks:

• The public domain and important subdomains, hosting provider, registrar, DNS provider, and certificate renewal method.
• Who has access to each service and who can approve changes. Store credentials in your password manager, not the checklist.
• The key pages and actions to test: homepage, contact form, booking flow, checkout, and other business-critical paths.
• Where alerts go, who is responsible for them, and when to contact the client.
• Backup location, retention, restore procedure, and the date of the last successful restore test.

Daily: watch for urgent changes

• Review uptime alerts and confirm a reported outage from an independent network before telling a client it is widespread. A single failed check can also be caused by a network or firewall issue.
• Investigate certificate expiry warnings, unexpected DNS changes, and domains approaching renewal.
• Check urgent security, hosting, and application notifications for the sites you manage.
• Assign each actionable alert an owner and a next step. Avoid marking an alert resolved until the public site has been checked again.

A scheduled monitor can reduce the manual work here. SitesRadar’s free plan checks uptime hourly and other site-health checks daily for one site; its paid plans check uptime every five minutes. Frequency and coverage are detailed on the pricing page.

Weekly: test the things a ping cannot

• Open the key pages on a phone and desktop, especially after a deployment or plugin update.
• Submit a test contact or booking form where the client has agreed on a safe test process; confirm the message reaches the intended inbox.
• Review broken links and redirects, particularly after publishing or moving pages.
• Review metadata in linked documents and images after publishing files; author names, internal paths, or photo locations may be visible to the public.
• Apply relevant platform, theme, and plugin updates using the client’s change and backup process. Check the site after each meaningful change.
• Check that backups are completing and investigate failures. A successful backup job is not proof that a restore works.

Start with a free website check for a snapshot of issues such as broken links, SSL, and DNS. It does not submit forms, verify backups, or test every customer journey.

Monthly: review the client experience

• Review certificate and domain renewal dates and confirm the owner and payment method for each service.
• Check key page titles, descriptions, and links after content or design changes.
• Review DNS and email authentication changes with the person responsible for email. Record unexpected changes before reverting them; another vendor may have made an intentional update.
• Inspect Search Console for indexing issues and the queries and pages that bring relevant traffic. Compare like-for-like date ranges rather than treating one week’s movement as a trend.
• Send the client a short summary: what changed, what you fixed, what needs approval, and any upcoming renewals.

For a certificate-specific workflow, use the SSL certificate expiration monitoring guide. If a site is already unavailable, follow the client-site downtime triage checklist.

Quarterly: rehearse recovery and reset priorities

• Perform a documented restore test in a safe environment with the client’s approval. Record what was restored, how long it took, and any missing dependencies.
• Review access for former staff and vendors using the client’s normal access-review process.
• Recheck critical user journeys and any accessibility issues that need specialist review.
• Compare monitoring coverage with the current site inventory. A new shop, subdomain, or booking service can be missed if nobody adds it to the roster.
• Review recurring incidents and update the checklist when the same problem keeps returning.

Copyable website maintenance checklist template

Copy this table into a document or spreadsheet for each client. Fill in the owner, due date, and result; change the cadence to match the contract and the site’s risk. A result might link to an approved ticket or record the date and outcome of a manual check.

Cadence	Task	Owner	Due date	Result / next action
Daily	Review availability, certificate, domain and DNS alerts
Weekly	Test agreed contact, booking or checkout paths
Weekly	Review broken links, redirects and newly published file metadata
Weekly	Check backup jobs and apply approved updates
Monthly	Review renewal dates, key pages, DNS and email records
Monthly	Review Search Console and send the client an update
Quarterly	Test a restore safely and review access
Quarterly	Recheck critical journeys and the monitored site inventory

SitesRadar can monitor selected public-site signals, including on a WordPress site. The site owner or their provider is responsible for updates, backups, restores, form testing, diagnosis, and repairs; SitesRadar does not perform those tasks or inspect WordPress internals.

Copy this handoff for each site

Item	Record
Site and important hostnames	Public URLs covered by the care plan
Owner and backup contact	Person responsible for triage and escalation
Critical journeys	Forms, booking, checkout, and other actions to test
Renewal dates	Domain, certificate, and other time-sensitive services
Backup and restore	Location, retention, and last verified restore
Open issues	Finding, owner, next step, and target date
Client update	Completed work, remaining risks, and approvals needed

A checklist is useful only if someone owns it. Keep one record per client, set a review date, and link each alert or task to the person who can resolve it. For ongoing visibility across a roster, compare the SitesRadar plans and start with the free check before choosing a monitoring schedule.