The Complete Website Health Checklist for South African Small Businesses

Generic website checklists miss the South African specifics: POPIA, load shedding resilience, local payment quirks. This one doesn’t. Work through it in an afternoon; most checks take two minutes.

Security and continuity

1. SSL certificate valid — padlock shows, no browser warnings.
2. WordPress core, plugins and theme all current (check the Updates count in wp-admin).
3. Daily backups running, stored off your hosting server, and you know how to restore.
4. Two-factor authentication on every admin account.
5. No unused plugins or themes installed (delete, don’t deactivate).
6. Uptime monitoring active, alerting your phone.
7. Search site:yourdomain.co.za on Google — no pages you don’t recognise.

Speed and mobile

8. Homepage loads in under 3 seconds on mobile data (test on your actual phone, not office wifi).
9. PageSpeed Insights mobile score above 60 — below that, start with image sizes.
10. Site is usable one-handed on a phone: readable text, tappable buttons, working menu.
11. A CDN (like Cloudflare free) if your host is overseas.

Legal — the POPIA basics

12. A privacy policy that reflects what you actually collect — forms, analytics, cookies.
13. Consent language on forms that add people to marketing lists (pre-ticked boxes don’t count).
14. Contact details for whoever handles information requests (your information officer — for most small businesses, that’s the owner by default).

Leads and money

15. Contact form tested this month — sent, received, replied to. Silently broken forms are the most expensive fault on this list.
16. Phone number tappable on mobile (a tel: link, not just text).
17. If you sell online: full test purchase completed recently, including the payment redirect and confirmation email.
18. Google Business Profile claimed and pointing at the right URL.

Housekeeping

19. Copyright year current, staff and pricing pages accurate.
20. You — not your designer — hold the hosting, domain and admin logins, stored somewhere safe.

Scored under 15?

You’re in the majority, for what it’s worth. Every WP Hero subscription starts with us running exactly this audit on your site and fixing what’s fixable within the plan — the checklist is the onboarding.