I’ve spent years working on websites for businesses around Metro Detroit. Wholesalers in Southfield, a multi-location retailer, a restaurant, an LED display manufacturer in Wixom, a cigar festival. The tutorials I learned from were about building sites. Almost nothing I read was about small business website maintenance, which is where most of the real work happens. Here’s what I learned doing it.
The owner is not going to log in
This took me a while to accept. You can build the cleanest editing setup in the world, record a video walkthrough, write a one page guide. Most owners still will not log in. They are running a kitchen or a warehouse floor. The website is one of fifty things on their mind.
So I stopped designing for the owner editing everything. I design for one or two things they might actually change, like hours or a daily special, and I make those dead simple. Everything else, I assume I’ll handle. That changes how you price the work and how you set up the site.
Wrong hours cost more than a slow site
Developers obsess over load speed scores. I do too. But the complaint I heard most from owners was never about speed. It was a customer showing up to a closed door because the site or the Google listing had the wrong hours.
Holiday hours are the worst for this. Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, the Fourth. A customer checks the site, sees regular hours, drives over. Now they are annoyed at the business, not the website. I started putting holiday hour updates on a calendar for every client, a week ahead, and I check the Google Business Profile at the same time. It is the least technical task I do and maybe the most valuable.
What does website maintenance include for a small business?
People search this a lot, and the answers online tend to be long lists written to sell a maintenance plan. Here is what I actually do, in rough order of how often:
- Weekly: check the site loads, the contact form sends, and the phone number on the header is still right.
- Before any update: take a backup. Then update plugins one at a time, not all at once, and look at the home page and checkout after each.
- Monthly: look at Search Console for errors and pages that dropped out of the index. Check GA4 for pages getting traffic that nobody expected.
- Seasonally: swap promo banners, update holiday hours, and remove last season’s offers.
- Yearly: renew the domain and hosting on time, review who has admin access, and delete accounts for people who left.
That last one matters more than it sounds. On more than one site I’ve found admin accounts for employees who had been gone a long time. Nobody removed them because nobody knew they existed.
Wholesale sites are a different animal
At Universal Wholesale I ran two stores at once, one on WooCommerce and one on Shopify, with catalogs over 14,000 SKUs. At Wild Bill’s Tobacco I handled the wholesale B2B site along with the corporate sites. Wholesale buyers behave nothing like retail shoppers.
They know what they want. They search by item number. They reorder the same things. They do not care about a hero banner. What they care about is that the price is right, the case quantity is right, and the item is actually in stock. A typo in a pack size on a retail site is embarrassing. On a wholesale site it means a wrong order and a phone call.
So on wholesale sites, maintenance is mostly data. Price changes, discontinued items, new arrivals, inventory sync. I lived in Excel for a lot of it, checking exports before importing anything. One bad column mapping in a bulk import can overwrite thousands of products. I check a sample of rows by hand every time, even when I’m sure.
Redirects are not optional
Every migration I’ve done, the redirects were the part someone wanted to skip. Old product URLs, old category URLs, old blog posts. When a store moves platforms, the URL structure almost always changes. If you don’t map old URLs to new ones, every link from Google, from emails, from other sites, breaks at once.
I build the redirect map in a spreadsheet before the move: old URL in one column, new URL in the next. Then after launch I watch Search Console’s not found report for a few weeks and patch what I missed. There is always something I missed.
How often should a small business update its website?
The honest answer is less than people think for design, and more than people think for content. You probably do not need a redesign every couple of years. You do need your hours, menu, prices, staff and promotions correct all the time. A five year old design with correct information beats a new design with last year’s menu.
Software updates are their own schedule. WordPress and plugin updates come out constantly. I don’t apply them the day they drop on a busy store. I wait a little, read the changelog, back up, then update during a slow hour. Shopify handles the platform side for you, but apps still change and still break things.
Local businesses need local proof
One more thing no tutorial told me. Small local businesses win on trust. Real photos of the actual store, the actual staff, the actual food. A clear address. A phone number that someone answers. Stock photos of smiling models in a generic office make a family restaurant in Metro Detroit look like a chain, or worse, like a scam.
If I could give every small business owner one task for this week, it would be this: open your own website on your phone, call the number in the header, and check that the hours match what’s on your door. If any of those three is wrong, fix it today, before anything else on your list.