A practical website checklist for small businesses

Start with the customer journey

Open your homepage on a phone. Can you quickly identify what the business does, where it operates and how to contact it? Follow the path to your main service and contact page. Check that phone numbers, prices and opening hours are current. A page returning a successful HTTP response can still contain outdated or confusing information.

Check links and page responses

Visit the pages customers depend on: the homepage, main service page, contact page and booking or checkout entry point. A missing page or broken link can interrupt an enquiry. Redirects may be intentional, so confirm where they lead before changing them. Aither Watch samples up to seven same-site links; a clean sample does not mean every link across the site works.

Review search basics

Give important pages descriptive titles, a clear main heading and useful text about the service. Write an accurate search description for each page. Search engines may generate their own snippets. Fixing these basics improves clarity, but does not guarantee indexing or rankings. Check mobile presentation in a real browser: a viewport tag alone cannot establish that a page looks right.

Send a real test enquiry

Submit a short, clearly labelled test through your own contact form and confirm that it arrives in the correct inbox. Check spam filtering and any promised confirmation email. Aither Watch reads form markup but never submits a form or verifies delivery, so this part needs a separate check by you or your website provider.

Keep a record of meaningful changes

After editing important pages, repeat the checks and compare findings. Record the page, what changed and what still needs attention. Export an Aither Watch report as HTML or print it for your website provider. The manual checker is available in early access; paid daily monitoring remains closed until the Plans page confirms activation.

Further reading

• Google’s SEO Starter Guide