Is Your Website Ready For Autumn? There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles over a lot of businesses in August. Enquiries slow down a bit, everyone’s on holiday at different times, and the to-do list that felt so urgent in July somehow drifts to next week, then the week after that.
September has a way of snapping everyone back into it. The inbox fills up again, people start planning ahead for the busier months, and if you sell anything seasonal, this is often when the real work begins.
Before things properly pick up, it’s worth taking half an hour to get your website ready for autumn. Not a redesign, not a big project, just a quick, honest look to check nothing’s slipped through the cracks over the summer. Little things have a habit of going unnoticed when you’re not looking at your own site every day, an out of date opening hours banner, a form that quietly stopped working weeks ago, a page that still mentions a service you don’t offer anymore.
Here are seven things worth checking to get your website autumn ready, roughly in the order I’d tackle them myself.
Start here, because it’s the quickest win and the easiest thing to forget about once summer’s over. If you added a holiday banner, a temporary closure notice, or adjusted hours for August, now’s the time to take it down or update it.
It sounds obvious, but I still come across websites in September proudly announcing they’ll be closed for the last two weeks of August, weeks after they’ve reopened. It’s a small thing, but it tells a visitor the site isn’t being looked after, which isn’t the impression you want to give someone who’s just found you and is deciding whether to get in touch.
While you’re there, double-check your standard opening hours are still accurate too, as they may change in autumn as the climate changes, especially if anything changed over the summer months: reduced hours, a new team member covering different days, or a shift in when you’re taking calls versus just emails. Be autumn ready!
This is the one I’d genuinely encourage every business owner to test properly, not just glance at. Go to your website now, fill in the contact form as if you were an enquiry, and send it. Then wait and see if it actually lands where it should.
Forms can quietly break for all sorts of reasons, a plugin update, a change to an email address that didn’t get updated everywhere, a spam filter deciding your own enquiries look suspicious. The frustrating part is that when this happens, you often have no idea. The visitor sees a message saying their enquiry’s been sent. You never see it at all. You just wonder why things have gone quiet, when actually people have been trying to reach you the whole time.
If you have more than one form on the site, a general contact form, a quote request, a booking enquiry, test each one individually. They don’t always share the same settings behind the scenes.
If your business has anything seasonal coming up, a new autumn service, a Christmas booking window opening early, a change in pricing or packages for the busier months, your website should already reflect that, or be ready to the moment it goes live.
This is especially worth checking if you run any kind of booking system, retail site, or anything with dates attached to it. There’s nothing worse for a potential customer than getting excited about an offer they saw on social media, clicking through to the website, and finding no mention of it anywhere. It creates doubt, and doubt is exactly what stops someone getting in touch.
Even if nothing’s changing yet, it’s worth having a plan for when it will, and making sure whoever needs to update the site knows what’s coming and when.
Websites have a way of drifting slightly out of date without anyone deciding to let that happen. A team photo with someone who’s left. A case study for a project that’s no longer representative of your current work. A service you quietly stopped offering last year that’s still sitting there on the homepage.
Have a proper read through your key pages, not a skim, an actual read as if you were a new visitor. Ask yourself honestly whether it still sounds like your business today. If you’ve grown, changed direction slightly, or your ideal client has shifted since the site was built, this is worth flagging, even if a full rewrite isn’t on the cards right now.
Images are worth the same treatment. If your site is still using stock photography or older project photos and you’ve since built up a stronger portfolio of your own work, autumn is a good moment to plan a refresh, even a gradual one.
This is the least exciting item on the list and the easiest to put off, which is exactly why it’s worth doing now rather than waiting until something breaks.
If your site runs on WordPress, check when your plugins and theme were last updated. Outdated plugins are one of the most common causes of security issues and unexpected errors, and they’re also often behind a site that’s started to feel a bit sluggish. If you’re not confident making updates yourself, this is genuinely one of the easiest things to hand over to someone else, it takes minutes for the right person and can save real headaches later.
While you’re thinking about it, it’s worth running a quick speed check too. A slow-loading site puts people off before they’ve even seen what you offer, and it can affect how well you’re found in search results.
Your website doesn’t exist in isolation, and for a lot of local businesses, Google Business Profile is doing just as much work in bringing people to your door, or your phone, as the website itself.
Check your listing shows the correct opening hours, address and phone number, and that they match what’s on your website. Mismatched details between the two can look untidy at best and cause genuine confusion at worst, someone turning up expecting you to be open when you’re not, for example.
If you’ve had any recent reviews, take a moment to reply to them too. It’s a small thing that shows you’re paying attention, and it’s often one of the first things a potential customer sees before they even click through to your site.
September and October tend to bring more search traffic for a lot of businesses, as people plan ahead, compare options, and get things sorted before the year gets busier. It’s worth a quick check that the basics are still in good shape.
Look at your page titles and meta descriptions for your key pages, are they still accurate, and do they reflect what you actually offer now? Check that your main pages still have a clear keyphrase they’re written around, rather than trying to be everything to everyone. And if you’ve added new pages, projects or blog posts recently, make sure they’re properly linked from elsewhere on the site, so they’re easy for both visitors and search engines to find.
This doesn’t need to be a full audit, just enough of a check to know whether the foundations are solid or whether it’s worth getting a proper look done.
If you’ve read through that list and realised a few of these have been quietly slipping for a while, you’re honestly not alone. Most business owners are far too busy running the actual business to be checking plugin updates or testing contact forms every month, and that’s exactly the sort of thing a website health check or an ongoing support plan is there for.
There’s no pressure here, this list is genuinely meant to help whether you do it yourself or not. But if you’d rather hand it over and know it’s being looked after properly, that’s exactly the kind of thing I do day to day.
None of this needs to take long, and you don’t need to do it all in one sitting. Even ticking off one or two of these this week puts you in a much better position heading into the busier months ahead.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on any of it, get in touch and I’ll happily take a look.
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