Get your website ready for September: a 10-point checklist

In two weeks, everyone starts searching again

September and January are the two months when almost every business feels the surge: budgets get revisited, appointments get booked, deals that had been parked since July finally close. People come back with their to-do list in hand.

The problem is that most websites arrive in September exactly as they left June: summer opening hours still up, a contact form nobody has tested since March, and a homepage still advertising something you no longer offer.

The checklist

Ordered by effort-to-payoff. Do the first four and you've done 80% of it.

1. Test your own contact form (today)

Seriously, right now. Fill it in from your phone and confirm the email arrives — and doesn't land in spam. It's the most expensive and most common failure we find: perfectly good websites whose form has been sending to an address nobody checks for months.

Test the phone tap, the WhatsApp link and the directions link while you're there.

2. Update hours, prices and services

Summer hours on your Google listing, a service you stopped offering, a price from two years ago, a team page with people who left. All of it costs you credibility exactly when you're being looked at most.

3. Check mobile speed

On mobile data, not your office wifi. If it takes more than three seconds for anything to appear, you have a silent leak: people leave before they read you and it never shows up in your stats as a lost visit. How to tackle it, in Core Web Vitals.

4. Put your September offer front and centre

Your homepage can't be a generic brochure. If X is what sells in September, then X goes at the top, with its button, above the fold. One clear primary action. That's the whole idea behind turning visitors into customers.

5. Ask your summer customers for reviews

They're recent and they're happy. Ask now, before the memory fades: you'll head into September with fresh reviews, which is exactly what people compare. Here's how to ask without the awkwardness.

6. Review the six numbers

Open your analytics and see what your site did over the summer: conversions, conversion rate, cost per lead, organic traffic, speed and mobile. Whichever looks worst is your September priority. The full list is in the metrics that actually matter.

7. Publish something

If your most recent post is from May, Google and your visitors read the same message: nobody's home. You don't need an ambitious editorial plan — you need consistency. One article a month answering a real customer question beats ten in a week followed by silence. We go into it in a blog that brings customers.

8. See how an AI describes you

Ask ChatGPT or Gemini about your service in your city. More and more people decide this way, and it's worth knowing what they're being told about you. What to do with the answer, in how to get found in ChatGPT and AI answers.

9. Do the boring pass: broken links and certificates

Links going nowhere, images that don't load, an SSL certificate about to expire, a plugin last updated a year ago. None of this makes you money, but any of it can lose you some.

10. Set up out-of-hours cover

In September enquiries arrive at all hours, and plenty of them at night. If nobody replies until the next morning, a share of those people will have called someone else by then. An AI assistant covers exactly that window: answers questions, captures the contact, and leaves it ready for you in the morning.

How to spread it over two weeks

Not one of these ten points is a redesign. They're ten checks of an afternoon each — and September isn't waiting for you to be ready.

Your next step

Start with point 1. If your form is broken, nothing else on this list matters.

If you'd rather we looked at it, webifay runs a free website audit: we tell you what's holding your conversions back, what can be fixed in an afternoon, and what's worth doing before the season kicks off.