August is a strange month for a healthcare membership organisation.
The congress is either over or still weeks away. Half the committee is on leave. The policy consultations have gone quiet. Your inbox is, for once, not actively on fire.
And your website traffic is down — which most people treat as a problem, but I’d argue is the single most useful thing about August.
Because a quiet website is a website you can safely look at. You can change things without an audience. You can break something at 2pm and fix it by 3pm and nobody will have noticed. Try that in the week before your annual conference.
So here’s my suggestion. Block out one afternoon this month — genuinely, one afternoon — and work through the ten checks below. None of them need a developer. Most of them need nothing more than a browser and a bit of stubbornness.
1. Click every link in your main navigation
Start at the top. Open your menu and click every single item, including the dropdowns.
You are looking for two things: links that go nowhere, and links that go somewhere that no longer makes sense. The second is more common and much less obvious. A “Conference 2024” page still sitting in the Events dropdown isn’t broken, exactly. It’s just quietly telling every visitor that nobody’s been paying attention.
Write down what you find. Don’t try to fix it yet.
2. Look at your events listings
For most membership organisations this is the single fastest-decaying part of the site.
Are past events still showing as upcoming? Is there a registration form still accepting submissions for something that happened last spring? Is there anything at all in the “upcoming” section, or does it read as though the organisation stopped running events?
An empty events page is better than an out-of-date one. An out-of-date one suggests nothing is happening. An empty one at least suggests you’re between things.
3. Check your board, committee and staff pages
People move on. Boards rotate. Someone steps down and nobody thinks to tell the person who edits the website — usually because the person who edits the website is also the person who has fourteen other jobs.
This one matters more than it looks. For a membership organisation, the people page is a credibility page. A member checking who’s on the education committee, or a journalist checking who to approach for comment, will judge you on whether that page is current.
While you’re there, check the photos load and the job titles are right.
4. Test the member login — properly
Not “does the login page appear”. Actually log in.
Better still, ask a colleague who isn’t an administrator to log in with a normal member account, on their phone, and tell you honestly how it went. Administrators are the worst possible testers of their own member area, because they have a saved password, elevated permissions and years of muscle memory.
Then check the password reset. Send yourself a reset email and see whether it arrives, how long it takes, and whether it lands in spam. A reset email that goes to junk is functionally a broken login, and it’s one of the most common reasons members quietly give up and stop using a member area at all.
5. Submit your own contact forms
Every form on the site. Contact, membership enquiry, event registration, newsletter signup, the lot.
Fill them in with something obvious like “TEST — please ignore” and check where the submission actually lands. Forms break silently. A plugin update changes a setting, a notification email address belongs to someone who left in 2023, a spam filter starts eating everything — and there is no error message, no alert, nothing. Enquiries just stop, and it can be months before anyone notices the absence.
If you do one thing from this list, do this one.
6. Search your own site for old PDFs
Most membership organisation websites are quietly full of documents. Position statements, guidelines, annual reports, consultation responses, conference programmes.
Some of those are your most valuable assets. Some of them are superseded documents that people are still downloading and, worse, still citing. A clinical guideline from six years ago that’s been replaced twice is not a neutral piece of clutter — it’s actively misleading someone.
You don’t have to delete them. Archiving them clearly, or adding a short note at the top saying “this has been superseded by X”, is usually the right answer.
7. Look at your top five pages on a phone
Not on your laptop with the browser window made narrow. On an actual phone.
Pick your five most-visited pages — your analytics will tell you, and it’s almost always the homepage, the membership page, one event page, one resource page and the contact page. Load each one on a phone and try to do the thing the page exists for.
Can you read the text without zooming? Do the buttons work with a thumb? Does anything overlap? Is there a cookie banner covering the whole screen that you can’t dismiss?
Most of your members are on a phone. Most of the people who built the site were not.
8. Run one page speed test — and read the top line only
Put your homepage into Google PageSpeed Insights. You will get a wall of technical detail. Ignore almost all of it.
What you want is the headline score and the largest single problem, which for membership organisation sites is very often an enormous uncompressed image on the homepage, or a video that autoplays and loads before anything else.
This isn’t just about speed. Every unnecessary megabyte is server power and data transfer — it’s the least glamorous and most effective bit of making a website greener. A faster site is a lighter site, and members on hospital wi-fi or a train will thank you for it. There’s more on this in Greener Websites: A Simple Guide for Organisations on a Budget.
9. Find out what’s waiting to be updated
Log in to your CMS and look at your updates screen. WordPress, and most other systems, will tell you plainly: core, plugins, theme, and how many of each are behind.
You may not want to press the buttons yourself, and I’d be cautious about doing so without a backup — see the next point. But you should know the number. “Twenty-three plugin updates outstanding” is a fact about your organisation’s risk exposure, and it belongs in front of whoever is responsible for the site, even if that person is you and you’d rather not think about it.
Security issues in membership sites are rarely dramatic. They’re almost always an unpatched plugin that’s been sitting there for eighteen months.
10. Test that your backups actually restore
This is the one nobody does, and it’s the one that matters most.
Almost every organisation I speak to has backups. Very few have ever tried restoring one. Those are completely different things. A backup you have never tested is not a backup — it’s a hope.
Ask whoever manages your hosting three questions:
- How often is the site backed up, and where is the backup stored? (If the answer is “on the same server as the website”, that is not a backup. That’s a copy in the same building as the fire.)
- How far back do they go?
- When did you last restore one, and how long did it take?
If nobody can answer the third question, ask for a test restore to a staging site. It’s a routine job for anyone competent, and the answer will tell you more about the state of your website than the other nine checks combined.
What to do with your list
You’ll finish the afternoon with a page of notes. Sort them into three piles.
Fix now. Anything you can do yourself in under ten minutes. Out-of-date staff names, a stale event listing, a broken menu link. Just do these. Momentum matters.
Get help with. Anything involving the login system, forms not delivering, plugin updates, or backups. These are worth paying someone to sort out properly, once, rather than poking at nervously.
Live with for now. There will be things on your list that are genuinely annoying but not urgent. Write them down anyway. Next August you’ll have a record of whether they got better or worse, and that turns out to be surprisingly useful.
The point of all this
I’ve spent thirty years looking after websites, and the pattern I see most often isn’t neglect. It’s people doing website work in the gaps between everything else, with no time to step back and look at the whole thing.
August gives you that gap. One afternoon, ten checks, and you’ll know more about the state of your website than you did in June — and you’ll be going into the autumn with a list instead of a vague feeling of unease.
And if the list turns out to be longer than you’d like, that’s exactly what our Website Check-Up is for. We go through all of this and rather more besides — including what AI assistants currently say about your organisation — and you get a plain-English report within 48 hours, followed by a call to talk it through. It’s £400, and we deduct it from any work we go on to do together.
Because most websites don’t need replacing. They need somebody to look after them. If you’re not sure which camp yours falls into, Repair, Replace or Refresh? walks through how to tell.
