The Monday audit: what an automated weekly check actually runs

Most of what breaks on a business website breaks quietly. A redirect disappears in a redesign, a form stops sending, a tracking tag falls off one template, and nobody notices for weeks because nobody is looking.

Why it runs on Monday

We did not want to depend on someone remembering to look. So we built a check that looks for us, on a schedule, across every site we run, and reports before the week gets busy. It is not a person clicking around. It is a program that runs the same list the same way every week, then opens the fixes and writes the summary.

Monday is deliberate. Whatever broke over the weekend gets caught before a client notices, and whatever needs a decision lands on the day people are already planning the week.

What it actually checks

• Links. Every internal link on every page is followed. Anything that lands on a missing page, a dead redirect chain, or an error is written down along with the page it came from.
• Redirects. Old addresses that should send visitors to a new page are tested one by one. When an old address goes dead, Google and the visitor both lose the path at the same time.
• Robots and sitemap. The small file that tells search engines what they may crawl is read and compared to what we expect. One stray line can hide a whole site from Google. The sitemap is checked for pages that no longer exist and for real pages that are missing from it.
• Schema. The structured description of the business (name, address, hours, services, the questions it answers) is read from each page, checked for errors, and compared against the Google Business Profile so the two never disagree.
• Tracking. The analytics tag and the session recording tag are confirmed on every page template, not just the homepage. Tags fall off inner templates more often than you would think.
• Forms. A test submission goes through each form and we confirm it lands in the CRM and that the alert goes out. A form that looks fine and delivers nothing is the most expensive bug a small business can have.
• Search Console. Google's own report card for the site: new errors, pages dropped from the index, searches that gained or lost ground, and anything Google says it could not read.
• Session recordings. A sample of recorded visits from the past week, scanned for rage clicks, dead clicks, and pages people leave fast. The program sorts them and a person watches the few that matter.

What happens with what it finds

A report nobody acts on is a weekly reminder of guilt. So the audit does three things with its findings instead of just listing them.

1. It opens the fix as a code change. For anything mechanical (a broken link, a missing tag, a bad redirect) the audit writes the correction itself and opens it for review the way a developer would. A person reads the change, approves it, and it goes live. The find and the fix arrive together.
2. It posts a rollup to Slack. One message, every site on one list, each with a short line: what changed, what broke, what got fixed, what needs a decision. It reads in under a minute, which is the only reason it gets read.
3. It writes a PDF per site. The long version, for the client who wants to see it, or for the file that needs to exist when someone asks what we did in a given month. Same layout every week, so a change stands out.

The dashboard that compares every company

The last piece is a page that lines every site up side by side with the same scorecard: the builder, the landscaper, the painter, the advisor, the cabinet shop, the transit company. Which one has the most open issues. Which one has gone the longest without a problem. Whose Google traffic moved this week and in which direction.

Comparing sites to each other turns out to be more useful than looking at one alone, because it separates two kinds of problem. Some issues belong to one site. Others show up on three sites in the same week, and that is never a client problem. That is a template problem, and fixing the template fixes it everywhere at once.

What this changes for an owner

You stop finding out about a broken form from a customer who mentions they tried to reach you. You stop wondering whether the site is still being looked after a year after launch. And when you ask what has been done, there is a stack of weekly reports with the answer, not a vague reassurance.

None of this requires anyone to be a hero on Monday morning. The program does the looking. People do the deciding.

This weekly check runs on every site we build and maintain, from a painting company to a transit operator, and it is the reason we can say with a straight face that a site we launched is still working.

Questions people ask