Most website problems do not happen suddenly. They creep in over time — a plugin update slows things down, a new image is too large, an ad script starts misbehaving. By the time you notice, visitors have already had a poor experience.

A monthly health check catches these issues before they become visible to your visitors. Here is a simple checklist you — or your developer — can run through each month.

1. Check your Core Web Vitals

Open Google Search Console and look at the "Core Web Vitals" report. Are any pages flagged as "poor" or "needs improvement"? If you use a monitoring service, check whether your weekly report flagged any regressions.

If something changed: Recent updates to your theme, plugins, or scripts are the most common causes.

2. Review your page load speed

Run a few of your most important pages through PageSpeed Insights: your homepage, services page, contact page, and any landing pages you advertise. Focus on the mobile score — if it differs significantly from desktop, investigate why.

Target: Mobile score of 70+ on PageSpeed Insights.

3. Test your contact forms

Manually submit every form on your site and confirm that submissions arrive. Forms can silently break after plugin updates or email configuration changes and nobody notices until a lead goes missing.

4. Check for broken links

Visitors clicking a 404 page is frustrating and erodes trust. Use a free tool like W3C Link Checker or Dr. Link Check to scan your entire site for broken internal and external links.

Pay special attention to: Links in navigation, footer, and any pages you updated recently.

5. Review your analytics

Open your analytics dashboard and look at the last 30 days. Compare visitor numbers, bounce rates, and top pages against the previous month. Significant drops in traffic may indicate an SEO issue, a technical problem, or seasonality.

Watch for: A sudden drop in traffic from Google Search (check Search Console for manual actions or indexing issues).

6. Test on mobile

Open your website on an actual phone — not a browser's responsive mode, a real phone. Navigate through your key pages. Does the text overlap? Are buttons too small to tap comfortably? Does anything shift around while loading?

Mobile experience matters more than ever: Google indexes mobile versions first, and most small business websites receive over 60% of their traffic from mobile devices.

7. Check your uptime and monitoring alerts

If you have uptime monitoring, review the past month's alerts. If your website went down, did you notice? How long did it take to resolve? Consider setting up a monitoring check that alerts you if your site stops sending performance data.

8. Review recent changes

Think about what changed on your site since last month:

New plugins or theme updates?
New pages added?
New tracking scripts or third-party embeds?
Any developer changes deployed?

Each change is a potential cause of a performance regression. If you noticed a dip in metrics this month, the cause is likely among these changes.

9. Check your security status

Ensure your CMS, plugins, and themes are up to date. Check for any security advisories related to your stack. If you use SSL (you should be), verify your certificate has not expired or is not about to expire.

10. Run a fresh Lighthouse report

Run a Lighthouse audit (built into Chrome DevTools) on your most important page. While Lighthouse is a lab-based test and not a perfect proxy for real-world performance, it catches obvious issues: oversized images, render-blocking resources, missing meta tags.

Automating the checklist

If running this checklist manually sounds like too much, you can automate most of it with a website monitoring service. A weekly report can cover:

Core Web Vitals pass/fail status
Month-on-month traffic trends
Performance regressions across key pages
Anomaly detection (unusual behaviour)
Prioritised recommendations for issues found

That is exactly what Web Vitals Collector does — so you get the peace of mind of a monthly health check, delivered weekly without the manual effort.