The ten-minute checkup your page needs once a month
A link page does not rot loudly. It goes stale one small piece at a time, and the only reliable fix is a short routine you actually repeat.
Ten minutes, once a month
Nothing on a link page breaks all at once. An item sells out, an event passes, a service quietly changes an address, and the page goes on looking exactly as correct as it did in the spring. Nobody writes to tell you. The person who taps a dead link closes the tab, and you never learn that they came at all.
So this is not maintenance in the dull sense. It is the only feedback loop the page has. Ten minutes on the first Monday of the month is enough, and doing it roughly every month beats doing it thoroughly once a year.
The checklist
Work through it in order. Each step takes under two minutes, and the order matters: the first one changes what you notice in all the rest.
- Open the page on your phone, not on the desktop where you edit it. Almost everyone who sees it sees it this way — a narrow frame, a thumb, and no patience.
- Tap every link and watch where it actually lands. Not the label, not what you remember writing, but the page that opens. This is the step people skip, and it is the one that finds real damage.
- Look at what sits at the top and ask whether it is still true this month. The top slot is the only one most visitors read, so anything finished or sold out is a lie in the best position you have.
- Hide what is out of season instead of deleting it. A summer menu, a finished tour, a campaign that ended. A hidden block keeps its wording and its image for next time; a deleted one has to be written again.
- Read the bio line as if you had never met yourself. One line, cold, out loud. If it does not say what you do or who you do it for, it is decoration.
- Check that the photo is still you. Photos age quietly, and a picture from two haircuts ago makes a page feel abandoned even when everything on it works.
- Look at views for the last thirty days and ask what changed, not whether the number is good. A drop after you reordered the page is information; a number on its own is not.
- Open the page from inside the app your audience actually uses. In-app browsers render differently, and a page that looks right in a real browser can still be awkward where people meet it.
Why a phone, and why every tap
You edit on a wide screen where everything fits and the text is comfortable. Visitors get a narrow one, in a hurry, usually one-handed. Half of what a checkup finds is invisible on a desktop: a heading that wraps into three lines, an image cropped to the wrong half, four links that say roughly the same thing and cannot be told apart at a glance.
Tapping every link is manual because nothing does it for you. A page of links has no way of knowing that a shop has retired a product, and a link that opens a perfectly valid page saying "this listing has ended" is not broken in any technical sense. Only a person going through them notices.
Thirty days of numbers, read honestly
A link page counts page views and unique visitors over seven and thirty days, and that is enough to answer one question well: did anything change. Compare the month with the one before it, then look for a difference you can attach to something you did — a new photo in a profile, a link moved to the top, a campaign that ran for a week. Links that go through a redirect — the ones with a short path of their own, or with a destination per platform — add one more line each: taps over thirty days. That is the only place a link says anything about itself.
The temptation is to read the number as a verdict on you. It is not. A page with sixty visitors a month is doing its job perfectly if sixty people were all who came looking. Direction is what matters, and the only way to explain a direction is to remember what you changed while it moved.