The 31st of March means GST wash-ups, a fresh budget and a board pack that actually gets read line by line. Somewhere in that pile sits the website, still open twenty-four hours a day, still the first thing a new customer sees before they ever speak to your team. Most business owners will check their accounts twice before signing off. Few will check the site even once.
That's worth fixing, because a website that has drifted for a year rarely announces it. Enquiries slow down a little, rankings slip a page or two and load times creep up. Nobody notices until a competitor's site is doing better business than yours for reasons nobody can quite name. We've written before about what a website like that actually costs you every month, and the number is bigger than most owners expect.
Run through this as a plain checklist rather than a technical audit. Some points take five minutes to confirm. A couple might turn into a longer job for whoever manages your site day to day, and that's fine too. Use the start of the new financial year as the trigger to actually do it.
Five checks on whether the site is doing its commercial job
Give the site a job and a number
Ask your team what the website is meant to achieve this year and count how many different answers you get. A homepage built to generate quote requests, build brand credibility and rank for twenty keywords at once rarely manages any of the three well. Pick one primary job for the year, whether that's enquiries, online sales or qualified leads for the sales team, and give it a number. If enquiries sat at 40 a month last year, decide what number makes the site worth the spend this year. We go into how that gap between a site that exists and a site that converts shows up in practice in why your website isn't converting.
Fix the first five seconds and the obvious conversion path
A visitor arrives with a rough idea of what they want and roughly five seconds of patience before they decide whether you look credible. If your phone number, contact form or buy button take more than one click to find, you're relying on visitors patient enough to hunt for it. Most won't bother. We cover what actually builds that trust fast in five seconds to trust. Check every path a customer might take to buy or enquire, then time yourself doing it.
Test page speed and Core Web Vitals properly
Run your homepage and your best-selling product or service page through Google's PageSpeed Insights rather than trusting a general sense that it feels fine. Look specifically at Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift, because these are the numbers Google uses to help decide where you rank and also what visitors feel as sluggishness before they can name it. Bloated image files, stacked apps and forgotten tracking scripts are the most common culprits, and every one of them is fixable without touching the design. The full method for finding and fixing them lives in our guide to website optimisation.
Check the mobile experience as a customer would
More than half your traffic is probably arriving on a phone, so test the site on your own phone using mobile data rather than the office wifi with everything cached from your last ten visits. Check whether menus tap cleanly, whether forms are painful to fill in with a thumb and whether images load before patience runs out. Cart and checkout matter even more on a small screen, which makes this worth its own pass for any ecommerce build.
Confirm the SEO foundations are actually in place
Open five pages at random and check the title tags and meta descriptions actually describe what's on them, rather than a default the platform generated when the site first went live. Confirm your key service pages link to each other where it makes sense, because internal links are how Google and customers both find their way to the pages that make you money. Broken internal links after a site restructure account for plenty of ranking drops that get blamed on algorithm updates. We cover the less obvious ways rankings slip in the silent SEO killer.
Five checks on whether the site is safe, current and actually yours
Check what's actually been updated this year
Scroll to the oldest content on the site, the founder bio, the FAQ page or an old case study and check the date. A site that hasn't published or edited anything in twelve months can signal to Google that the business behind it has gone stale, even when trading has never been better. Updated pricing, a recent project added to the portfolio or a retired product line that no longer exists all count as freshness, more than a blog post written purely to fill a content calendar. Fresh content supports search visibility as well as credibility, and we unpack that connection in how website design and SEO work together.
Confirm connected systems are still talking to each other correctly
Most sites of any size run integrations doing real work in the background: freight calculators, accounting sync, booking systems or a CRM picking up form submissions. These connections drift over time. An API key expires, a plugin update breaks a mapping or a freight rate table hasn't matched actual courier pricing since a contract changed months ago. Place a real test order or submit a real enquiry and follow it through to the inbox, the CRM or the accounting system it's meant to reach. Skyrocket scopes and manages how these connections fit into a Shopify build, with the technical connection itself sitting with the relevant platform or app vendor, and this is exactly the detail most likely to have drifted a year after launch.
Check platform updates and basic security hygiene
Webflow and Shopify handle most core security patching for you, which removes one traditional headache but not all of it. Check that apps and plugins are current, that old ones nobody uses have actually been removed rather than just deactivated and that whoever holds admin access still needs it. A former staff member with an active login two years after they left is a bigger risk than most owners realise. This is the kind of ongoing task a proper support and maintenance plan is built to catch before it becomes a problem.
Confirm you actually own the domain, code and accounts
Ask directly: who owns the domain registration, who has admin rights to the CMS and who controls the Google Analytics, Search Console and ad accounts running behind the site? For plenty of businesses the answer is a previous agency, a former employee's personal account or nobody currently in the building. Sort that out now, while nothing is urgent, rather than during a dispute or a rushed handover later. We cover the ownership questions worth asking any agency in how to choose a website agency in NZ.
Put a realistic support plan against the year ahead
Decide now, not in November, how site changes will get made for the next twelve months: who fixes a broken form on a Friday afternoon, who updates seasonal pricing and who owns the SEO basics day to day. Some businesses run this in-house. Others put a support and maintenance arrangement in place specifically so nobody's guessing who's responsible when something needs attention. Either way, budget for it properly this year rather than treating it as an afterthought once the invoice for the original build has been paid. Real numbers for that planning are in what a website actually costs in New Zealand.
If several of these came back as a no rather than a maybe, this stops being a health check and becomes a rebuild conversation, whether that means a fresh Webflow build or a Shopify rebuild depending on what the business needs the site to do.
Common questions
How long should a health check like this actually take?
Most of the ten points can be checked in an afternoon by someone with basic admin access to the site and its analytics. Page speed, mobile experience and the ownership questions are quick to confirm on their own. Integration health and content freshness take longer if nobody has looked at either in a while, so allow real time for those rather than rushing them in the last week of March.
Should we get an SEO retainer instead of fixing what's already there?
It depends what's actually broken. A retainer adds an ongoing cost on top of a site that might only need the fixes in this checklist done properly once. We've set out that trade-off in SEO retainer or a better website, and for most businesses the better return sits in fixing the foundation before paying monthly for more content on top of it.
What if the health check turns up more problems than we expected?
That's common, and it often means the site has been left alone rather than actively managed. Prioritise by commercial impact rather than trying to fix everything in the same week: a broken checkout matters more than an outdated meta description, and a security gap matters more than either. Work through the list in order of what actually affects revenue first.
Do we need to fix all ten points before the site is considered healthy?
No single point on this list will sink a website by itself. The ones that touch money directly, such as conversion clarity, page speed and integration health, deserve attention first. Content freshness and metadata polish can happen over the following months as part of normal upkeep rather than a one-off scramble.
What if the checklist points to something bigger than a fix?
Sometimes it does. If four or five points come back as a genuine no rather than a maybe, the conversation shifts from patching an existing site to weighing up a rebuild, and that carries its own budget and timeline.
Run the ten points this month while the new financial year is still fresh, fix what you can straight away and put a plan against the rest. If the list turns into more than a few afternoons of work, or you'd rather have someone independent run it for you, get in touch with us.
