Small businesses tend to compare buying equipment. Save up, spend the money, use the
product, only pay attention to it when it breaks. I get it, a website has a price, a start date, and a launch day, so while it has the look of a project. Projects end and you just check them off.
But a website doesn’t behave like an asset. It behaves like the building you bought. The
difference between those two ideas is worth more to your business than anything I could
do to your homepage.
What happens to a site that goes stagnant:
When someone just hands you the login and disappears, they don’t generally tell you
everything. A website and specifically WordPress sites are running eight to fifteen pieces of software
that the core developers maintain. Those get updated constantly, mostly for security
purposes and some functionality improvements. If you leave them alone for a year; you’re
running known vulnerabilities that are published, indexed, and scanned automatically by
crawlers. You’re not being targeted individually, your website just has the vulnerabilities
their looking for, and your site gets added to a list. Your content sits still and goes stagnant. The service you stopped offering is still on the page. The prices are two pricing periods ago and that leads to an upset customer expecting something you advertised. These issues are just small reasons for a new visitor to not trust you before ever visiting your business.
What Google Sees:
Google keeps moving underneath your website constantly. Page speed
expectations tighten. Mobile standards shift. The way search results display changes. A
site built correctly three years ago is still a site built for the algorithm that existed three
years ago. And your competitors don’t stop and wait either. They’ve shopped around, updated their
services, collected 40 reviews, and built their website for keywords that are being searched
daily. They are building for the future and business longevity while you’re just running your
business day-to-day. None of this just stops working instantly. There’s no day when your site breaks and you notice. It’s a slower cooldown period than that. You just get fewer calls than you used to,
and you can’t figure out exactly why.
Reverse The Scenario:
Run the same scenario in 2 years with someone watching your business from the digital
space. Your software stays current, so your vulnerabilities stay low. Broken links get caught before
your customer finds them. The service page you added last spring has been indexed for
eighteen months, and it ranks top 5. The content is fresh from your most recent update, but
the age of the page determines the trust it’s given. Your photos are current and reviews
accumulate. Each page you add gives the others somewhere to link too, and your whole
site gets stronger. Your domain authority works the same way. It doesn’t spike randomly, it builds. A domain with four years of consistent, maintained content behind it will outrank a brand new site
with better design almost every single time, and there is no shortcut around that. Time is an
input you can’t purchase. That’s the compounding metrics behind it all. Small, unglamorous inputs that don’t look like much in month two and made the biggest impact in year three.
The Truth:
The uncomfortable truth in that sentence is that it works in reverse just as reliably. A site
left alone doesn’t just hold in-place. It begins to fade, month after month, to everyone who
continued to keep with the times and adapt to the market.
Why does it matter?
If you think of a website as a project, then the only sensible thing to do is get the cheapest
one that looks acceptable. Which is fine if you just want something to buy again in 3 years
just like that piece of equipment. If you think of it as part of your core infrastructure, the calculation changes completely. Now you’re asking who’s going to be responsible for this thing in month fourteen, and whether they’ll still answer the phone. You want to make that decision on purpose than discover it four years from now when the site is broken and the person who built it has moved on entirely
Here’s where I am biased…
I sell maintenance. So when I argue that websites need ongoing care, I’m arguing for the
thing I get paid to do. But that doesn’t change the facts I built my business this way on purpose, because the alternative is a model where lower rates exist but I need a constant stream of new clients and have no reason to care what happens to your site after the check clears. Then when it breaks, I MIGHT get the
opportunity to rebuild it again and have to answer “why wasn’t it done right the first time.” I
didn’t want that business. I wanted the one where it’s done right and maintained for as long
as your business is around, so you never have to worry about “why isn’t it working”.
That means my incentive and yours point the same direction, which is the most you can
ask of anyone you hire.
What can you do now?
• Log into your site and check when the software was last updated. If you can’t tell, or the
answer is longer than a few months, that’s your answer.
• Open your site on your phone and try to book, call, or buy something as if you were a
customer. Time how long it takes.
• Search for what you do plus your town, and see who shows up above you. Then look at
how many pages their site has compared to yours.
• Pretend you’re a consumer and try to be unbiased as possible…Navigate around your
website for a few minutes. Is that the experience you want your customer to have? Would
you make a purchase or do service with them if this was your first impression?
Whatever you find, the fix is the same shape. Pick who’s responsible for this thing going
forward, put it on a schedule, and stop thinking of it as finished.
A website is never going to be finished. That’s the whole point.