2026 is here: 6 things you absolutely need to do to your website

January 2026 is already here and moving quickly already into the month. However with the first week out of the way and on top of everything since last year it’s time to focus on your business website and ensuring it’s ready for the road ahead. We’ve prepared 6 things you need to look into for your website to ensure it’s ready for 2026!

1. Take down any Christmas and New Year opening hours

It’s like the Christmas decorations – it’s always sad to be packing them away into boxes again for next year but it’s important now you are not closed for Christmas and New Year to ensure your customers are aware of this. Leaving any popups or notices on beyond this point shows to any potential customers you have not updated your website in quite a while and may put them off converting on your website!

2. Update the footer of your website

This small amount of text in the footer of your website can be a key piece of information to a potential customer to ensure you are keeping your website up to date, or simply leaving it for an extended period of time.

3. Test your contact form

Before going out and looking for new business it’s also important that your website’s contact form is working as expected! If not, you could be bringing customers to your front door, they are ringing on the front door, but nobody is answering — the worst situation you can be in!

This includes ensuring the email is arriving into the inbox of the correct person, and not just being accepted and not actually appearing at the right place. Sometimes this can be passwords expiring on the web server, changes by an IT team causing the website to be unable to send internal email or other reasons.

In any case once fixed, a good contact form will store submissions within your website so that upon fixing emails, leads can be re-sent and contacted.

4. Check your opening hours

Have your local opening hours changed? If so now is a good time to check to make sure they are correct, especially if you have a physical location. It’s also a good idea to take this time to double check your details are also correct on Google My Business and any business directories you may have signed up to additionally.

Google likes to ensure details are matching across as many sources as possible which will help local rankings, especially when potential customers are searching for you during your opening hours.

5. Check your staff profiles are up to date

Now is a great time to check as well if your staff profiles are all up to date, and any photography involving your team is up to date. It’s not the best impression if profiles are available, especially if your staff profiles link to LinkedIn profiles and then potential customers find out actually the member of staff no longer works for your company!

For larger team shots, getting the team together with the new year energy for a team photo is also a great idea, along with looking to refresh your company’s photography in general!

6. Check your social media is up to date

Next on the list is to check profiles elsewhere – for example if you no longer use Twitter then remove it from your website! There’s no point in keeping links to profiles that customers won’t get any benefit from! Also it’s worth checking if your audience is on newer platforms such as Bluesky and adding this to your social media list.

Plus for any social media you do use, ensure your opening hours are up to date, you are linking back to your website and your branding is consistent throughout! Otherwise with an old logo, customers may not be familiar with the correct branding!

Bonus: See if your website reflects your company

Give your homepage and the other pages of your website a click around and see if a potential customer visiting these pages can get a feel for who you are as a company. Does the design feel outdated, or the feel of the website feel like it’s lagged behind with where you are now as a brand, business and a company? This may be time in 2026 to start looking for getting a new website.

Conclusion

We hope this short set of tips is a good start for getting your website spring cleaned and ready for business in 2026, or if it feels like a mountain of chores and you need additional help then feel free to contact us to find out how we can help you with this.

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