Run a full audit after every major change to your site, and monitor continuously in between. For most small business sites, a weekly automated check is enough. For sites that change daily or earn directly from search, a daily check is worth it.
The honest answer depends on how often your site changes and how much it costs you when something breaks. A brochure site that never changes needs less attention than a store that ships new pages every week. The schedule below covers both.
A full audit is a deep check you read and act on. The single most useful time to run one is right after something significant changed, because that is when problems get introduced without anyone noticing. Run an audit after:
Each of these can quietly add a broken link, a noindex tag, a slow page, or a broken sitemap. Checking immediately after the change means you catch it while you still remember what you did.
Audits handle the changes you make. Monitoring handles the ones you did not. A certificate expires, an external link dies, a third-party script slows the page down, or a setting drifts. None of these come from an action you would think to audit.
Continuous monitoring re-checks the site on a schedule and alerts you only when something gets worse. It turns "I should remember to check the site" into "the site tells me when it needs me."
| Site type | Audit | Monitor |
|---|---|---|
| Brochure site, rarely changes | After changes, plus quarterly | Weekly |
| Active small business site | After changes, plus monthly | Weekly |
| Store or site that earns from search | After changes, plus monthly | Daily |
| Agency managing client sites | On onboarding and after client changes | Daily |
Manual checking depends on you noticing that something might be wrong. The problems that hurt most are the ones that give no visible sign on the homepage, so there is nothing to prompt you to look. By the time traffic drops enough to notice in analytics, the issue has been live for weeks. A schedule removes the need to remember.
Run a free scan to see where your site stands today. Add monitoring to get alerted whenever it changes for the worse.
Run a free scanAudit after every major change, and monitor continuously in between. A weekly automated check suits most small business sites; a daily check suits sites that change daily or rely heavily on search traffic.
After any redesign, migration, CMS update, or batch of new pages, and at minimum once a quarter even if nothing changed.
They do different jobs. An audit is a deep snapshot you act on. Monitoring is a continuous watch that alerts you the moment something regresses. Most sites benefit from both.
A redesign, a platform or CMS update, a plugin or theme change, a migration to a new host or domain, or publishing a large batch of new pages.