The annual website checklist every regional business should run through
- Jun 17
- 5 min read
It is EOFY. You are reconciling the books, renewing the insurance and finding receipts in places receipts should never be. While you are at it, spare a thought for the hardest working thing in your business that never gets a performance review: your website.
Plenty of regional business websites get built, launched and then left to fend for themselves. Twelve months on, the opening hours are wrong, the team page stars someone who left in spring and the contact form quietly gave up sometime around Easter. Nobody noticed, because nobody was looking.
So here is the checklist. One hour, once a year. Phone in one hand, cuppa in the other, honesty switched on. Businesses across the Macedon Ranges, this one is for you.
1. Check that everything on your site is still true
Read every page as if you have never met your own business. Are the opening hours right? Are you still offering everything you say you offer? Is there anyone on the team page who now works for someone else?
Out-of-date information costs more than it looks like it should. A customer who drives twenty minutes to a closed door because your website said you were open does not blame Google. They blame you. And they tell people.
2. Test everything that can break
Forms, buttons and links do not break loudly. There is no alarm, no error, no smoke. The enquiries can stop arriving, and your website carries on looking perfectly fine about it.
Send yourself a test enquiry through your contact form and make sure it actually lands
Tap your phone number on mobile and check it dials, not just sits there
Click every booking link, menu PDF and social icon like a customer in a hurry
Hunt down broken links to pages that no longer exist
If your form has been broken for three months, that is three months of enquiries that went precisely nowhere. You will never know who they were. That should bother you.
3. Open your site on your phone
Your customers are not browsing your website at a desk with a coffee and time to spare. They are standing in the main street of Woodend or Kyneton, phone in hand, deciding where their money goes in the next ninety seconds.
Scroll your key pages on your own phone. If you are pinching to zoom, squinting at grey text or waiting for a photo to crawl onto the screen, so are they. Most of them will not wait around to see how it ends.
4. Look at your photography honestly
Does your website still look like your business? Venues get renovated, menus change, products evolve, teams grow. If your photos are four years old, your website is out there selling a business that no longer exists.
Photography is the single biggest visual signal of quality on a regional business website. Dated, dark or shot in a rush on a phone? Top of the fix list. The work might be brilliant, but nobody can tell from here.
5. Check your search foundations
Google your business name. Then google what you do and where you do it, the way an actual customer would. What comes up? Be honest about whether you would click on it.
Confirm your Google Business Profile matches your website exactly, right down to the hours
Confirm you have Google Search Console set up and review all indexed pages
Never opened Search Console? Never set it up? Worth knowing. It is the closest thing you have to hearing what Google really thinks of your website, and Google is not shy.
6. Ask whether AI can find you
Search is changing fast. More of your customers are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews for recommendations instead of scrolling through ten blue links. Whether your business shows up in those answers comes down to GEO: clear, structured, genuinely local content that AI tools can read and trust.
We have written a full explainer on what GEO is and why it matters for regional businesses. The short version: if your website was built before anyone was thinking about AI search, it was built for a game that has changed the rules.
7. Look at the numbers
Open your analytics and ask three questions. Where are visitors coming from? Which pages do they actually look at? Where do they give up and leave?
You do not need to be a data analyst, and you do not need a dashboard with forty graphs. Ten honest minutes once a year will tell you whether your website is pulling its weight or just sitting there looking decorative.
8. Decide what gets fixed first
By now you have a list. Do not try to fix everything at once, that is how nothing gets fixed at all. Start with whatever is actively costing you enquiries right now: the broken form, the wrong hours, the site that will not load on mobile.
Then work down to the slow leaks, the dated photography and the soft search foundations.
The websites that rarely need this checklist
Here is the quiet truth: the businesses that breeze through this list are the ones with a team in their corner all year round. When your website, social media and photography are regularly reviewed and updated by people in regular contact with your business, nothing gets the chance to go stale.
Fresh photography flows through from every shoot. The monthly content calendar keeps your web messaging current. Changed your opening hours? Fixed everywhere within the week, not discovered by a customer in month eleven. That is the difference between a website that is updated regularly and a website that is checked once per year.
When the list is longer than you thought
If your website has been flying solo for a while and the checklist turned up more than you expected, do not panic. That is not a failing, it is just what happens when regular updates and reviews aren’t being made. The catch is that many fixes tend to sit in that awkward middle ground: too technical to DIY, too small to justify a whole new website.
That is exactly what our website optimisation sessions are for. Kelly, KGMG Web Design Expert, works directly on your existing site in a half day or full day block: fixing, tightening and bringing your SEO and GEO foundations up to standard. No rebuild. No months-long project. One focused session, a hands-on handover, and a website that finally works as hard as you do.
New financial year = time to get your website in order.
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