Quick answer: Before hurricane season, make sure your website has a recent backup you can restore, your contact details and hours are correct everywhere, you know how to post a closure or reopening notice in minutes, and you can log in to your hosting and domain accounts from a phone. None of this takes long, and it is far easier to do on a calm day than during a storm warning.
If you run a small business in Sarasota County, your website is often the first place customers look when something changes. Are you open? Is the shop closed until further notice? Can I still book? A site that answers those questions quickly saves you phone calls and keeps customers from guessing. This checklist is meant to be done once, early in the season, and then revisited briefly each year.
1. Make sure you can restore your site
A backup is only useful if you know where it is and how to use it. Check three things:
- Where backups live. Find out whether your hosting plan includes backups, where you see them, and how you restore one. Do not assume. Look at your dashboard and read the help page.
- A copy you control. Keep your own copy of your site files and, if you use WordPress, your database export, on a computer or cloud drive you can reach from anywhere. Label it with the date.
- A restore you have tried. If possible, test restoring to a spare folder or subdomain once. A backup you have never opened is a guess.
Our guide on what to check about website backups goes into more detail on what a good backup setup looks like.
2. Keep your business details correct and consistent
In an emergency, customers search for your phone number, address and hours, and they will trust whichever source looks most recent. Walk through each place they might look:
- Your website's contact page and footer.
- Your Google Business Profile.
- Your social media profiles.
- Any directory listing or booking page you control.
Make sure the name, address, phone number and hours match. If you have a temporary number or an alternative way to reach you, decide now where you will post it. Having one agreed place to update first makes everything else quicker.
3. Prepare a simple "status" notice
You do not need a complicated alert system. You need a way to put a short message at the top of your homepage in a few minutes. Three practical options:
- A banner line on the homepage. One sentence such as "We are closed today and will update this page when we reopen." Know exactly which file or page setting you edit to change it.
- A dedicated "Updates" page. A single page you link from the menu and keep short. Customers learn that this is where news lives.
- A pointer from your other channels. A pinned social post or Google Business Profile update that says "see our website for the latest."
Write a template message for closing and another for reopening, and save both somewhere you can find them. When the time comes, you only need to fill in the date.
4. Make sure you can log in from anywhere
You may not be at your office computer when you need to change something. Check that you can sign in to:
- Your hosting dashboard.
- Your domain registrar account.
- Your email account tied to both.
- Your Google Business Profile.
Confirm that two-step verification codes arrive on a phone you will have with you, and keep recovery codes in a safe place. Store your passwords in a password manager rather than a file that lives only on one computer. If a trusted colleague or family member might need to update the site in your absence, decide in advance how they will get access safely.
It also helps to know which company holds your domain and which holds your hosting, because they are often different. If that is unclear, read common domain, hosting and nameserver mistakes.
5. Keep the site light enough to load on a weak connection
During and after a storm, people often search on phones with a slow or patchy signal. A page full of large images and heavy scripts may never load. A few easy improvements:
- Put your key information, such as phone, hours and status, in plain text near the top of the page, not inside an image.
- Compress large photos before uploading them.
- Avoid auto-playing video or slideshows on the homepage.
If your site feels slow even on a good connection, this article on slow or undersized hosting explains how to tell what is going on.
6. Check your HTTPS and renewal dates
Expired certificates and lapsed domains cause problems at the worst times. Put these on your calendar:
- Your domain's renewal date, and make sure the payment card on file is current.
- Your hosting renewal date.
- Whether your SSL certificate renews automatically. Many hosts handle this for you. Check that yours does. If you want the background, read what an SSL certificate is.
Turn on auto-renew where it is offered, and confirm that renewal reminders go to an email address you actually read.
7. Ask your host the practical questions
You do not need to be technical to ask these, and the answers are usually in the host's help pages:
- How do I restore from a backup, and how long does it usually take?
- How do I reach support if something goes wrong, and what hours is it available?
- What happens to my site and billing if I cannot pay on the usual date?
- Can I download all my files myself at any time?
The last question matters most. If you can always download your own copy, you are never fully dependent on anyone else.
8. A short pre-season routine
- Download a fresh copy of your site and store it in two places.
- Check name, address, phone and hours on your site and your Google Business Profile.
- Write and save your closing and reopening messages.
- Test logging in to every account from your phone.
- Confirm renewal dates and payment methods.
- Note where each login, backup and template lives, on one page you can find easily.
That is a one-hour job for most small sites, and it is the kind of work that pays off whether a storm arrives or not.
Where ABCTeck fits
If you are looking at hosting while you tidy things up, ABCTeck plans start at $5 a month, your hosting account is ready in minutes, free SSL is issued automatically, and you manage your sites, email, databases and backups from one dashboard. Your renewal price is locked for as long as your plan is active, there is no long-term contract, and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee. You can see the plans here. Whatever host you use, the checklist above still applies.
Related
Next, read our website launch checklist for a broader review of your site, or what to check about backups if that was the weakest point on your list. For hosting built around Sarasota County small businesses, see web hosting for Sarasota County.