How Often Should You Audit Your Website? A Practical Schedule

A pre-launch audit answers "is this okay to ship." It says nothing about six months from now. Dependencies age, content grows, third-party scripts get added, and browsers change - a site that passed every check at launch can quietly fail all of them a year later without a single code change of your own.

Why Websites Drift Even Without New Deploys

• New CVEs get disclosed in dependencies you already shipped and haven't touched since
• Marketing adds a new analytics or chat script that ships with its own console errors or CSP violations
• Content grows past what the original site architecture and internal linking accounted for
• Browsers ship updates that change how existing CSS or JS behaves
• TLS certificates and DNS records have expiry dates and renewal windows, whether anyone remembers them or not

A Practical Cadence

• Performance (Core Web Vitals) - on every deploy that touches a page template, plus a scheduled weekly check for drift with no code change behind it (a new third-party script, a CDN change).
• Broken links and JS errors - on every deploy, ideally as a CI gate. This is the cheapest category to automate and the easiest to catch before a user does.
• Security headers and TLS - monthly, and immediately after any infrastructure or CDN configuration change.
• Dependency vulnerabilities - continuously. New CVEs don't wait for your release schedule, so this is the one category that genuinely benefits from real-time monitoring over periodic checks.
• Accessibility - automated checks on every deploy for the categories a scanner can catch, plus a manual keyboard/screen-reader pass quarterly or after any significant UI change.
• Full technical SEO review - quarterly, or after any site restructuring, migration, or CMS change.

Automating the Cadence So It Actually Happens

The honest failure mode isn't not knowing this schedule - it's knowing it and not following it, because none of these checks are anyone's full-time job. A schedule that depends on someone remembering to run it manually degrades within a quarter. A schedule that runs itself - a CI gate on every deploy, a weekly scheduled scan, continuous dependency monitoring - is the only version of this that survives contact with a normal engineering workload.