Web Design
The website check to do before Q4
Your website does more work in the last three months of the year than in the other nine, and it does that work while you’re too busy to notice whether it’s doing it well.
That’s the case for looking at it now. September is the last quiet stretch. A problem found this week is an afternoon; the same problem found in the middle of November is a bad day in the middle of your best month.
None of what follows needs a developer. It needs about an hour and a phone.
1. Send yourself a message through your own contact form
Start here. This is the check that fails silently and costs the most.
Fill in your own form the way a stranger would, then confirm the message actually arrived. Check the junk folder of whatever address it goes to. Most forms are tested once, the week the site launched, and then left alone for years while the inbox gets closed, the host changes something, or an update breaks delivery.
From the outside you can’t see the failure. The form still looks right and still says thank you. It just doesn’t send, and nobody is going to email you to say your email is broken.
2. Tap everything on a phone
Open your own site on a phone and tap the things a customer would tap.
- Does the phone number start a call, or is it just text sitting on the page?
- Does the address open a map?
- Does the email link open a blank message to the right address?
- Can you reach the contact details without pinching, zooming or hunting?
Do this on cell data with the office Wi-Fi switched off. Your site is cached on your own network in a way it never will be for a first-time visitor, and that cache is why owners are so often surprised by how slow their site feels to everybody else.
3. Find out when things expire and whose card is on file
Three dates matter, and most owners can’t name any of them: when the domain renews, when the hosting renews, and when the SSL certificate renews.
Then the question behind those dates: is the payment card on file a card that still exists? An expired card in November takes a website down in the busiest quarter of the year, and the repair is a phone call nobody can make because nobody has the login.
While you’re in there, check who the registrar lists as the domain’s owner. That may be someone other than whoever built the site. More than one business has found its domain sitting in the account of a web designer they parted ways with years ago, and that’s far easier to untangle before you need to move.
4. Read your own site as though you had never seen it
Give yourself five seconds on the homepage, on a phone, and see whether three things are answered: what you do, where you do it, and how someone contacts you.
Five seconds is roughly what a visitor gives you before deciding whether to keep going. A site that answers those three questions in that window converts better than a prettier site that doesn’t.
5. Fix the seasonal details before the season
This is the unglamorous list, and the one that generates actual phone calls in December:
- Holiday hours and closures, on the site and on your Google Business Profile
- Cut-off dates for orders, bookings or appointments
- Any promotion from last year that is still sitting on the homepage
- A copyright year in the footer that stopped updating three years ago
That last one is small, but it counts. A stale year is the fastest way for a visitor to conclude that a business might not still be open.
6. The two gaps almost nobody has closed
We audited 24 small-business websites across the East Bay this year. 22 of the 24 had no cookie consent banner at all, which is a gap under California’s CCPA and CPRA rules. Most were also missing image alt text, which is an accessibility problem and an ADA risk.
Neither will announce itself. Nobody complains about a missing cookie banner. Either a demand letter arrives or it doesn’t, and you can’t know which until it happens. Both are cheap to fix, and neither gets cheaper by waiting.
Here’s what a fix does and doesn’t do. Adding a consent banner, a real privacy policy and proper alt text lowers your risk and is the right thing to do for people using screen readers. It is not a certificate of compliance, and anybody who sells it to you as one is overselling. We build to WCAG 2.1 AA and we ship cookie consent with every site. That’s a standard we work to. It isn’t a legal outcome we can promise you.
7. Know how you would get the site back
Two questions. Where is the backup of your website, and when did somebody last restore from it?
If the answer to the second one is never, what you have is a folder you hope is a backup. You find out which on the one day it matters.
Do it in September
Nothing on this list is difficult. It doesn’t get done because a website that loads feels finished, and something louder always wants the hour.
But the site works the nights and weekends you don’t, and Q4 is when it’s asked to work hardest. Give it an hour now, while an hour is still cheap.
Want a straight answer about your website? We’ll tell you what’s working, what isn’t, and the top three things to fix. Free, no pitch.
The cookie-consent and alt-text figures come from Exosphere Solutions’ own 2026 audit of 24 East Bay small-business websites, written up in full in We audited 24 East Bay business websites. Accessibility guidance follows the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 at level AA.