TL;DR Key takeaways
- Test your site on a phone, on mobile data, outside town: that is how many customers see it.
- Fix stale hours, prices and team details now; a single wrong fact makes visitors doubt the rest.
- Submit your own contact form and test every route in, because broken forms fail silently.
- Apply updates, check your PHP version, and actually restore a backup to prove it works.
December is quiet for a lot of businesses in the north-west. The tourist season along the Wild Atlantic Way has wound down, Westport and Strandhill are calmer, and there is finally a spare afternoon to look at the website that has been running on autopilot since spring. I would use that afternoon for a proper year-end audit. It doesn't need an agency or a big budget, just a checklist and a bit of honesty.
Here is the one I use for clients in Sligo, Mayo and beyond. Five areas, in order of how often they cause real problems.
1. Speed on a rural connection
Test your site on your phone, on mobile data, somewhere outside town. Plenty of your customers are browsing from a farmhouse outside Ballina or a car park in Enniscrone, not an office with fibre. Watch for:
- Huge hero images uploaded straight from a camera or phone.
- Sliders and video backgrounds that load before anything useful.
- Plugins you installed once and forgot about.
Google's PageSpeed Insights will give you Core Web Vitals figures, but the phone test is more telling. If it feels slow to you, it feels slow to everyone.
2. Content that has quietly gone stale
Read your site as a stranger would. Are the opening hours right for winter? Is the Christmas schedule up? Does the team page still show someone who left in the summer? Do prices still match what you actually charge?
Stale content costs more than people think. A visitor who spots one wrong detail starts doubting the rest. Make a list, fix the small things now, and note bigger rewrites for January. This is also a good moment to check that your Google Business Profile matches the website exactly: same phone number, same hours, same address.
A website doesn't have to be new. It has to be true.
3. Every route to contact you
Go through each way a customer can reach you and test it yourself.
- Submit your own contact form and check the email actually arrives, including in the spam folder.
- Tap the phone number on a mobile and confirm it dials.
- Check the WhatsApp or Messenger link, if you have one.
- Try the booking system or online shop checkout from start to finish.
I regularly find forms that stopped sending months ago after a hosting change. Nobody noticed because nobody complained; the enquiries simply vanished.
4. Security updates you've been putting off
If you're on WordPress, log in and look at the updates screen. Core, themes and plugins should all be current, and anything abandoned by its developer should go. Check your hosting control panel too: PHP 8.1 reaches the end of its security support at the end of this December, so if your site is still on it, or anything older, ask your host about moving to a supported version and test the site afterwards.
Also worth doing: remove old user accounts, turn on two-factor authentication for admins, and make sure your SSL certificate renews automatically.
5. Backups you have actually tested
Most people have a backup. Far fewer have tried restoring one. Find out where your backups are stored, how often they run, and whether they're kept somewhere other than the server the website lives on. Then restore a copy to a staging site, or at least download one and open it. A backup you can't restore is just a comforting feeling.
Where to go from here
If you'd rather not do all this yourself, my free website check will flag the obvious problems, and a care plan takes updates, backups and monitoring off your plate for the whole year. You can read more about how I work with local businesses on my pages for web design in Sligo and web design in Mayo.
Either way, give your site an hour this month. January will be busy enough.