There is a fairly dangerous assumption businesses make about their website. If you type the address into Chrome, the thing appears, the padlock is there and nothing immediately catches fire, the website is working. Technically, yes. In much the same way that a car with an engine that starts is technically working, even if it has four flat tyres, no MOT and hasn’t moved off the drive since 2023.
Being live is a ridiculously low bar for a website. It tells you the server responded when somebody asked it for a page, but it tells you absolutely nothing about whether anybody can find it, whether they’re finding the right things when they arrive, whether the content still resembles the business or whether the website has generated a meaningful enquiry this side of Christmas. A website can be technically alive while being commercially stone dead, and there are a lot more of them around than people realise.
We launched it. Lovely. What happened next?
Building a website has a wonderful ability to make everybody suddenly care about marketing. The MD wants to know why that photograph was chosen, somebody from accounts has unexpectedly strong feelings about the homepage, three people spend half an hour debating whether a button should say “Get in touch” or “Contact us”, and somebody inevitably asks whether the logo could be a little bit bigger. For a few weeks, the website becomes the most important thing in the business.
Then it launches, everyone has a look and somebody sticks the link on LinkedIn. A few people say it looks great, everyone congratulates themselves and attention moves on to whatever is next. The website, which received an almost ridiculous amount of attention during the build, suddenly gets about as much attention as the office fire extinguisher.
That is normally where the problem starts, because the website stops changing while absolutely everything around it carries on. People join, people leave, services change, prices move, new products launch, old ones disappear, the sales process improves and customers start asking different questions. The business gets better, but the website sits there faithfully preserving the company as it existed on the afternoon somebody pressed Publish.
Two years later, you’ve got a business that’s moved forward and a website that’s essentially become a time capsule. It still loads perfectly well, of course, which makes it remarkably easy to convince yourself that everything is fine.
Working and working properly are two very different things
We probably need to stop using the word “working” when we’re talking about websites because it covers far too much. When somebody tells us their website is working, what they normally mean is that it loads, the domain hasn’t expired, there isn’t a massive database error across the homepage and the contact form appears to do something when you press Submit.
Obviously, all of that matters, and we would strongly recommend having a website that actually loads. But those things are the absolute minimum requirements rather than evidence that you’ve got an effective website.
The better question is whether it’s working for the business. Can somebody understand what you actually do? Can they find the service they’re interested in without digging through six layers of navigation? Does the website give them a reason to trust you? Is there an obvious next step, and does that next step match the way you actually want customers to contact or buy from you?
Then there is everything happening before somebody even arrives. Can Google understand what the important pages are about? Are you visible for the searches that actually matter commercially? If you’re spending money on advertising, are you sending people somewhere designed to continue the conversation from the advert, or just dumping everybody on the homepage and hoping they’ll work the rest out themselves?
A website can pass every technical test and fail most of those commercial ones. At that point, congratulations, your website is live, but it’s also dead.
Dead websites rarely look dead
This is probably why the problem gets ignored for so long. A neglected website doesn’t normally announce its decline with a dramatic bang and a notification saying, “Your website is now shit.” It happens gradually enough that nobody really notices.
Someone leaves the company and stays on the About page for another nine months. A service changes but nobody updates the page, then a new service launches and never makes it onto the website at all. Marketing starts running ads and sends everyone to a generic services page because nobody built the landing page that was supposed to go with the campaign.
Then there are the smaller things. An old offer remains buried in some copy, a form becomes awkward on mobile, an important page gets slower and the calls to action no longer match the way the sales team actually handles enquiries. You end up with three pages competing for basically the same search term because nobody has looked at the structure since the website was built.
None of those things feels catastrophic on its own, which is exactly why they survive. Give it long enough and you’ve got twenty small problems, six outdated pages, a confused customer journey and a website that everybody internally has simply learned to ignore.
Your business has moved on. Has your website?
One of the easiest ways to expose this is to look at your own website and pretend you’ve never seen it before. That is harder than it sounds because you know the business, so your brain automatically fills in everything the website doesn’t explain properly.
You know what that slightly vague sentence is supposed to mean, you know where the important service is buried and you know the photograph on the About page is three years old. You know that the phone number still works even though the person named next to it left eighteen months ago, and you know that the service described in paragraph four has actually changed quite significantly since the copy was written.
A potential customer knows none of that. They get whatever you’ve put in front of them, and if they don’t understand it, they don’t schedule a meeting to give you an opportunity to explain what the website was trying to say.
So ask yourself whether somebody arriving today would understand the business you’re running today. Would they find your strongest work, understand your current services and see the reasons your existing customers choose you? More importantly, would the company described on the website sound anything like the company your sales team would describe if they were sitting across the table from the same person?
If those two versions of the business have drifted apart, you don’t automatically need a new website. You probably need to start looking after the one you’ve already paid for.
Nobody actually owns the bloody thing
This is where we see a lot of websites start to deteriorate. While a website is being built, somebody owns the project. There are deadlines, meetings, content requests, development lists and usually somebody making a nuisance of themselves until all the decisions have finally been made.
Once it goes live, that ownership often disappears. The hosting company keeps the server running, the developer might still be around if something breaks, marketing occasionally changes a sentence and Dave knows how to add a blog post because somebody showed him once. Nobody is entirely sure who has the Analytics login, but somebody definitely did at some point.
The problem isn’t necessarily that nobody is capable of changing the website. It’s that nobody is responsible for deciding what should change, looking at how the site is performing and making sure the thing continues to reflect where the business is going.
Without that ownership, website management becomes entirely reactive. Something breaks, somebody fixes it and everyone goes back to ignoring it until the next thing breaks. That’s maintenance in the loosest possible sense, but it isn’t management.
Hosting isn’t website management
Hosting matters, as do backups, security, updates, monitoring and all the other boring technical things nobody particularly wants to think about until one of them goes wrong. They are the foundations of a properly managed website, and pretending they don’t matter is a fairly reliable way to eventually have a very unpleasant afternoon.
But keeping a website online is not the same as keeping it useful. You could host exactly the same outdated homepage beautifully for the next ten years, serving it in milliseconds from an immaculate server with daily backups and flawless uptime. It would still be an outdated homepage.
Think about a physical shop that has working electricity, functioning locks and somebody checking the fire alarm every month, but hasn’t changed its window display, stock layout, signage or opening information in three years. Nobody would look at that and say the business was being brilliantly managed because the lights still came on every morning.
The website is no different. Once the technical foundations are taken care of, somebody still needs to pay attention to the thing customers actually experience.
Sometimes it needs changing. Sometimes it just needs somebody to give a shit.
Not every change needs to become a six-month redesign project. Sometimes a service page needs rewriting because customers keep misunderstanding what you offer, or a campaign needs a proper landing page instead of being sent to something vaguely relevant that already exists.
Sometimes the photography needs updating, a customer journey needs simplifying or a new location needs its own page. Sometimes old content needs deleting, internal links need improving, calls to action need changing or a brilliant piece of work needs adding because it is a much better example of what the company can do than something you published three years ago.
None of this is particularly glamorous, but that’s sort of the point. A good website doesn’t stay good because somebody periodically has a massive idea about it. It stays good because somebody is paying attention between the massive ideas.
Google isn’t standing still while you ignore it
Search creates another problem because your website isn’t operating in isolation. Even if you change absolutely nothing, the environment around it is changing constantly, and your competitors certainly aren’t under any obligation to leave their websites alone just because you have.
They publish better pages, strengthen their content, improve their sites and start targeting searches they previously ignored. Search results themselves change, the language customers use changes and pages that once answered a question brilliantly can gradually become less useful.
This is why treating SEO as something that was “done when the website was built” doesn’t make much sense. A website that ranked well two years ago doesn’t get to keep those positions forever because everybody worked very hard on it at the time.
That doesn’t mean you need to churn out endless articles about absolutely nothing in the hope that Google rewards enthusiasm. Sometimes the smartest SEO decision is to improve an existing page, merge two weak ones, remove something pointless or properly connect the content you’ve already got.
What matters is that somebody is actually looking. If nobody is, the decline can carry on for quite a while before anybody notices what it is costing.
Then you start paying to send people to it
This is where neglect starts getting particularly daft. A business can be incredibly sophisticated about generating attention while being remarkably casual about what happens once it gets it.
You can spend thousands on Google Ads, build paid social campaigns, send email campaigns, produce content and work hard to improve organic visibility. Then every one of those channels eventually points somebody towards the website that hasn’t had any meaningful attention since the Christmas decorations were still up two years ago.
We see businesses obsess over an advert’s click-through rate and then send every click to a page that was never designed for the campaign. They’ll debate audiences, bids and creative while nobody asks whether the page people land on actually gives them a decent reason to become a customer.
Getting more people onto a neglected website doesn’t fix the website. It just gives more people the opportunity to experience the problem.
You probably don’t need to rebuild it
There is an important point here because agencies have a habit of discovering that every website problem can apparently be solved by paying an agency to build another website. Funny that.
Sometimes a rebuild is absolutely the right answer. The technology might be limiting, the structure might be a mess, the brand might have moved on completely or years of patching things together might mean starting again is genuinely the sensible option.
But plenty of websites aren’t bad enough to throw away. They’ve simply been neglected for long enough that they need some attention, and there is a huge difference between those two things.
A decent website with outdated content, weak landing pages and a few poor journeys can often be made significantly better without setting fire to the whole thing. More importantly, if you rebuild a neglected website without changing the reason it became neglected, you’ve solved absolutely nothing in the long term.
You’ll get a lovely new website, everyone will get excited, it’ll launch and then everybody will disappear again. Give it another two years and you’ll be having exactly the same conversation.
A website is an asset, not a project
This is probably the bit we need businesses to think differently about. A website isn’t something you build, launch and then consider finished until somebody eventually decides it looks old.
It is a working part of the business. Customers use it, marketing sends people to it, search engines interpret it and sales teams depend on it to do a lot of the explaining before they ever speak to somebody.
That means the useful part of a website’s life actually starts after launch. That’s when real customers begin using it, analytics start showing what they’re doing and all the assumptions made during the build finally get tested against reality.
The business will change during that time, because businesses are supposed to change. Your website should be able to change with it rather than becoming an increasingly inaccurate historical record of what the company used to be.
Keeping it alive
This is ultimately why we built Flow. We didn’t think the world desperately needed another hosting package with a slightly different storage allowance and a nice table comparing how many backups you get.
At its simplest, Flow handles the technical foundations that keep a website healthy: hosting, updates, backups, monitoring and maintenance. As businesses need more, it becomes the ongoing relationship that keeps the website itself moving too, whether that’s content changes, new pages, campaign landing pages, forms, development or improvements to the journeys people actually use.
Because keeping a website online and keeping a website alive are not the same job. One tells you that the server is still answering, while the other tells you whether the website is still earning its place in the business.
That car on the drive might start first time every morning. At some point, though, somebody should probably ask whether it’s actually going anywhere.
