After you’ve spent a lot of time, effort, and resources on getting your website just right, it’s tempting to sit back and relax for a while. But a website is not a “fix it and forget it” kind of thing. It needs your attention on a routine basis.

You should assess your website for these seven things on a monthly basis:

• Check your links. When you redesigned your website, you changed many links, right? Well, so does every other website! Few things are more annoying to a web visitor than clicking on a broken link. If you don’t have a link checker program in use, get one.
• Check and refresh your content. Healthcare information is prone to changes, with so much research going on. Treatments change, new medications are developed, new treatment protocols are put into use, etc. Your health content should be reviewed on a periodic basis, and at least annually. Enlist your clinicians to help with this task. If you license health content from a vendor, confirm that the vendor reviews and updates the content periodically and make sure you apply any changes they make on your site.
• Test your site on new browsers and devices. Just because your site looks good on a PC running Chrome or Firefox does not necessarily mean it looks good on an iPhone using the latest iOs version. You should also test with new versions of programs such as JavaScript.
• Check and recheck JavaScript interactions. If JavaScript develops a glitch, a large part of your site can quit working.
• Check all the forms on your site. Is there a bigger turnoff to a new patient than trying to fill out a form that has stopped working? A nonworking form hurts your bottom line. Make sure they are all working.
• Don’t forget your customized hacks and workarounds. Sometimes it’s necessary to be creative when building your site. Be sure to note all improvised or customized hacks and workarounds that you’ve implemented and check them whenever a browser is updated or a new browser becomes available. You may have to update your changes in order to keep your site working smoothly.
• Your backup plan. You DO have one, don’t you? Most likely you have a vendor doing this for you. But if you have a smaller site, you might want to consider doing manual backups.