WEBSITE MAINTENANCE FOR PLUMBERS. WHAT TO DO EVERY MONTH (5 MINUTES MAX)

Dear Plumber,

You change the oil in your work truck. You service your drain machine. You clean your tools.

But when's the last time you did maintenance on your website?

If you're like most plumbers, the answer is "never" or "I didn't know I was supposed to."

welcome to the club

Look, a website isn't a "build it and forget it" thing. It needs regular checkups. Just like the plumbing in a house, small problems that get ignored turn into expensive disasters.

The good news? Website maintenance for a plumbing business takes about 5 minutes a month. That's less time than it takes to eat lunch.

Here's your checklist.

The 5-Minute Monthly Website Checklist

### 1. Make Sure Your Website Is Actually Up (30 Seconds)

Pull out your phone. Go to your website. Does it load?

You'd be surprised how many plumbing websites go down and the owner doesn't notice for weeks. Maybe the hosting expired. Maybe there was a server issue. Maybe the domain renewal got missed.

Meanwhile, every person searching for a plumber in your area clicks your link and gets a big fat error page.

Set up free uptime monitoring with a tool like UptimeRobot. It checks your site every 5 minutes and texts you if it goes down. Free. Takes 2 minutes to set up.

### 2. Test Your Phone Number (30 Seconds)

Go to your website on your phone. Tap your phone number. Does it call the right number?

Now check the number on your Contact page. Same thing?

I've seen plumbing websites where the header shows one number and the footer shows a different number. I've seen click-to-call buttons that dial the wrong area code. I've seen phone numbers that aren't clickable at all.

Your phone number is literally the most important thing on your entire website. Test it monthly. Takes 30 seconds.

### 3. Check Your Contact Form (30 Seconds)

If you have a contact form, fill it out and submit a test. Did you get the email? Did it go to spam? Did it go anywhere at all?

Contact forms break silently. The form looks fine on the page, but the emails stop coming through. Maybe the form plugin updated and broke something. Maybe your email provider changed settings.

If your contact form hasn't worked for 3 months and you didn't know... how many leads walked away?

### 4. Update Your Hours and Info (1 Minute)

Anything change this month? New phone number? New service area? Holiday hours coming up? Did you add a new service like water heater installation or gas line work?

Your website should always reflect your current business. Outdated information is worse than no information because it breaks trust.

Quick things to check: - Business hours (especially seasonal changes) - Service list (added anything new?) - Service area (expanded to a new city?) - Staff changes (did someone leave or join?) - Promotions or specials (remove expired ones, add new ones)

### 5. Check Your Google Business Profile (1 Minute)

While you're at it, hop over to your Google Business Profile and make sure everything matches your website.

Same phone number. Same hours. Same address. Same services.

Google uses consistency across your website and GBP as a trust signal. If they don't match, it hurts your rankings. This is a core factor in how Google ranks plumbers.

Also, check if anyone posted a question on your Google Business Profile Q&A section. These pop up sometimes and if you don't answer, random strangers do. And they're not always accurate.

### 6. Do a Quick Visual Check (1 Minute)

Scroll through your homepage and a couple other pages on your phone. Does everything look right?

Look for: - Broken images (showing as blank boxes or broken icons) - Weird formatting (text overlapping, buttons missing) - Outdated content (a promotion from 6 months ago still on the homepage) - Dead links (click a few links and make sure they go somewhere)

Websites can break in subtle ways after updates. A quick visual scan catches the obvious stuff before a potential customer does.

What Happens When You Skip Maintenance

I talked to a plumber in Orlando who hadn't touched his website in 2 years. Here's what we found:

1. His SSL certificate had expired 4 months ago (browsers were showing "NOT SECURE" warnings to every visitor)
2. His contact form was sending emails to an inbox he no longer uses
3. His phone number on the homepage was his old number from when he switched providers
4. 3 of his service pages had broken images
5. His Google Business Profile showed him closed on Saturdays (he works Saturdays)

He'd been hemorrhaging leads for months and had no idea.

A 5-minute monthly check would have caught every single one of these issues.

Set a Calendar Reminder

Seriously. Pull out your phone right now and set a recurring monthly reminder. First of the month. "Check website."

That's it. Five minutes. Once a month.

Or, if you want someone else to handle it, most web hosting and maintenance plans include monthly checkups. We include ongoing maintenance with our plumbing websites at FastLaunchWeb. Updates, security, monitoring, all handled. See what's included.

The Annual Deep Clean

Once a year, go beyond the 5-minute check and do a deeper review:

1. Update your copyright year in the footer (nothing screams "abandoned" like "Copyright 2021")
2. Refresh your photos (new truck? New team members? New equipment?)
3. Review your content (is everything still accurate?)
4. Check your page speed (run a PageSpeed Insights test)
5. Update your services (anything you stopped offering? Anything new?)
6. Read your reviews (update the testimonials on your site with recent ones)

Think of it as the annual inspection for your website. Catch the small stuff before it becomes a big deal.

Get Your Free Website Health Check

Not sure what shape your website is in? Get a free website audit and we'll check everything. Speed, security, mobile-friendliness, SEO, broken links, the works.

We'll tell you exactly what needs fixing and how urgent each issue is. No charge. No pressure.

P.S. Your website is working 24/7 to bring you customers. Treat it like any other piece of equipment in your business. Maintain it. Check on it. Keep it running. Five minutes a month. That's all it takes to avoid the kind of website disasters that cost you real money.