How Often to Look at Any of This

Both extremes cost you

Daily checking shows variation that means nothing, which produces changes made in response to noise.

Those changes then make the next reading unreadable, since something moved and nobody knows what caused it.

Never checking means a broken form, a fallen page, or a security notice sits for months.

So the question is a cadence rather than a principle, and the answer differs by what is being checked.

Monthly: four numbers

• Enquiries, counted.
• Arrivals from search, branded and not.
• Your top five landing pages.
• Anything with a notice attached.

Fifteen minutes, written into the same document each time. The value is entirely in having twelve of them rather than in any single reading, which is why the writing down matters more than the looking.

Quarterly: the deeper checks

Which take an hour and are worth diarising.

Page speed on three pages, with the settings recorded.

The indexed count against the pages you wrote.

Your local listing, for hours, categories, and photographs.

Which of your pages are competing with each other.

And a test submission of your own contact form, which is the check that most often finds something.

An hour four times a year covers everything that decays slowly.

Twice a year: the tidying

Since some things only need attention occasionally.

The third-party tools list, removing anything nobody owns.

Subscriptions, against actual usage.

Details that go stale: hours, prices on pages, staff, the fees in any reference page you maintain.

And the pages nobody has looked at in two years, for anything that is now wrong.

That is an afternoon twice a year, and it is where most of the accumulated mess gets cleared.

Immediately: two things only

The exceptions to any cadence.

A manual action notice or a security notice, both of which are explicit messages about your site rather than statistics.

And a customer telling you something is broken, which is worth more than any monitoring.

Everything else can wait until the monthly check, including a ranking that moved, a traffic figure that looks odd, and a competitor doing something new.

Treating any of those as urgent is precisely what produces the reactive changes this cadence exists to prevent.

A worked example

A business checked their rankings most mornings and made changes whenever something moved.

Over a year they had changed three page titles four times each, rewritten a service page twice, and could not say whether any of it had helped.

They moved to a monthly check with four numbers written down, a quarterly hour, and a rule that nothing gets changed in response to a single reading.

Within two quarters they could see which changes had done what, because there were fewer of them and each had a date.

The site performed better, largely because it had been left alone long enough to settle.

The owner also stopped thinking about it daily, which he counted as the bigger gain.

Some things are worth watching continuously

Which is a different activity from checking and should not be confused with it.

An automated check that your site is up, and an alert if it is not, runs constantly and costs nothing, and several services do it free.

The same applies to your certificate expiring and your domain renewing, both of which are dates rather than judgements.

Those are alerts about something being broken, which is exactly the category that should interrupt you.

Setting them up once removes the argument for frequent manual checking, since the things that genuinely need immediate attention will now find you.

Who does the checking matters

A practical point in a business with more than one person.

Where nobody owns the monthly check it does not happen, and where everybody looks at the numbers separately, three people react to the same movement.

Name one person, give them the fifteen minutes, and have them report the four numbers rather than the interpretation.

That prevents the situation where the person who happened to look at the dashboard on a bad day raises it at a meeting.

If you use a supplier, ask them for the same four numbers in the same format, which makes their report comparable with your own record.

Set a threshold before looking

Which is what stops the monthly check becoming a weekly one.

Decide in advance what movement would prompt action: something like a fifth, sustained across two consecutive months, on a page that matters.

Below that, note the figure and do nothing.

Having the threshold written down means the decision was made calmly rather than while looking at a number that has dropped.

It also gives you something to point at when somebody else wants to react.

Write it in the same place every time

Since the record is the entire point.

One document, one line per month, with the date and the four numbers.

Twelve lines answer questions that no dashboard can: whether this is seasonal, whether last year was better, whether the change in March did anything.

Keep it where the business keeps things rather than in one person's notes, alongside the hosting details and the redirect list.

That way it survives the person who started it, which is what makes a two-year comparison possible at all.

The counter-case

Some situations need closer attention.

During and after a rebuild, weekly checking is correct, since that is when things break and the cause is known.

A shop in its busiest month should be watching daily, because the cost of a broken checkout is immediate and measured in orders.

And a business running paid advertising needs to watch that far more closely than any of this, since money is leaving every day.

Four numbers monthly, an hour quarterly, an afternoon twice a year, and act immediately only on the two explicit notices.

The cadence

1. Monthly: four numbers, fifteen minutes.
2. Quarterly: speed, index, listing, form.
3. Twice yearly: tools, subscriptions, stale details.
4. Immediately: manual actions and security notices.
5. Set a threshold before looking.
6. Write it in one place.
7. Change nothing on a single reading.

Step seven is the discipline that makes the rest work, since a site changed in response to every movement never accumulates enough stability to tell you anything.

Why the record matters is covered in keeping a record of what you changed.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.