The August Slowdown and What to Fix During It

The weeks after the long weekend

For many businesses, the weeks after the August long weekend are the quietest of the year. Clients are away, the phone rings less, and staff take their holidays in turns.

It is tempting to leave the website alone along with everything else. That gets the timing backwards.

The work that disrupts a site, such as moving host, switching to HTTPS, or rewriting and retiring pages, is cheapest when the fewest people are looking.

From September the phones ring again, and every one of those jobs costs more to get wrong.

Why disruptive work belongs here

Every change of this kind carries some risk: a broken form, a missing page, a delayed email. In a quiet week, a mistake reaches a handful of visitors instead of a crowd.

The scarce input is usually the owner's attention, for answering questions, checking pages and rewriting text. August is when it is most available.

And search engines take a few weeks to settle after addresses change. A move made now has settled before the busy season starts.

The work worth doing now

• Moving to new hosting, email included, while fewer messages arrive.
• Switching to HTTPS, if the site still shows Not secure in Chrome.
• Upgrading PHP before the version you run stops receiving fixes.
• Rewriting the pages customers read most, while there is time to think.
• Retiring old pages, with redirects, so no link breaks.
• Testing a restore from backup, not just the backup itself.

The first is the one to book soonest. Web companies fill September with everybody's autumn projects, and a hosting move needs a quiet week at both ends.

Moving host without losing email

A move touches the website, the email and the domain's settings at once. Email is where it usually goes wrong.

A day or two before, lower the time-to-live on the domain's DNS records, the setting that controls how long the old addresses are remembered, so the switch takes effect quickly.

Copy the mailboxes, test the contact forms on the new server, and keep the old hosting running for a couple of weeks before cancelling it, in case something was missed.

Switching to HTTPS

Chrome has labelled every page without HTTPS as Not secure for a year now. Certificates are free, so the cost of switching is the work, not the certificate.

That work is redirecting every old address to its secure version, fixing images and scripts still loaded from old addresses, and updating Search Console, Analytics, your Google My Business link and any ads.

A domain property in Search Console covers both versions at once, which makes the change easier to follow.

Expect a few weeks of small movements in search while Google catches up with the new addresses. That is exactly why the quiet month suits it.

PHP before December

PHP, the language WordPress and most small business sites are written in, has to be a supported version. PHP 5.6 and 7.0 no longer receive security fixes, and 7.1 stops on December 1.

On a WordPress site, the Site Health screen shows which version you have. Upgrading is a setting at most hosts, but an old theme or plugin can break, so test on a copy of the site first.

A broken plugin found in August is an afternoon's work. Found in a December rush, it is an emergency.

A worked example

A chiropractic clinic with three practitioners finds August its quietest month, with patients and staff away in turns.

Its site shared an old hosting plan with its email, still ran on HTTP and PHP 5.6, and carried pages for a 2016 new-patient offer and two practitioners who had left.

In the first week of last August, the clinic's web company moved the site and email to new hosting, upgraded PHP on a copy first, and replaced the one plugin that failed the test.

The following week the site switched to HTTPS, and the owner spent two afternoons rewriting the service pages. Eleven old pages were retired, each redirected to its nearest current equivalent.

One problem surfaced: a booking button still pointed at an old address for the booking system. It was found on a quiet Tuesday afternoon, rather than a full Monday morning in September.

Rewriting and retiring pages

List every page, and decide for each one: keep it, rewrite it, or retire it. Search Console shows which pages still bring visits from search, and those are worth rewriting rather than retiring.

Rewrite the pages customers actually read: services, prices, the area you cover, the contact page. Owners rarely have time for this in a busy month, and it shows.

Retire pages for offers that ended, staff who left and services you no longer provide. Redirect each to its closest current page, so old links and bookmarks still land somewhere useful.

One change at a time

Resist doing everything in one weekend. If the site misbehaves on Monday, you need to know which change caused it.

A sensible order is the restore test, then PHP on a copy, then the hosting move, then HTTPS, then the content. Leave a few days between each, and note the dates so later reports make sense.

And check one deadline while you are at it. From September 1, Google ignores noindex rules placed in robots.txt, so a site relying on one needs another method before then.

The counter-case

Not every business is quiet in August.

For a kayak rental, an ice cream shop or a golf course, the same list belongs in November or January. The principle is your quiet month, not this one.

A small site already on HTTPS and a current PHP version may need only the restore test and an afternoon of rewriting. And if a full rebuild is planned for the autumn, skip rewriting pages that will be replaced.

Otherwise, use the quiet weeks for the work that would hurt in a busy one.

The August list

1. Test a restore from your backup.
2. Check your PHP version in Site Health.
3. Book any hosting move for the quietest week.
4. Switch to HTTPS with redirects everywhere.
5. Rewrite the pages customers read most.
6. Retire old pages with redirects.
7. Finish two weeks before your busy season.

Step one is the one everything else depends on. Until a backup has been restored once, nobody knows whether it works, and every other job on the list leans on it.

Planning a full rebuild for the autumn is covered in summer is when to plan the fall website.

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.