How often should I check my website?

Twice a year is enough for most small businesses, plus any time something real changes — new hours, new prices, a staff change, a new number. Put a recurring reminder in your calendar for January and July. The January one conveniently catches the copyright year too.

Does an out-of-date website hurt my Google ranking?

Parts of it do. Search engines can tell when a site is slow, insecure, or awkward on a phone, and those count against you. Wrong hours or an old price won’t directly change your ranking — but they’ll lose you the customer who found you anyway, which is the part that actually matters.

The person who built my site is long gone. Where do I even start?

Find out two things: who your domain name is registered with, and who hosts the site. They’re usually two separate bills from two separate companies, and whoever controls those accounts controls your website. If you can’t remember either, search your email for the renewal invoices — the address they go to is normally the account holder.

Is it worth fixing an old site, or should I just get a new one?

Fix first. A rebuild takes weeks and real money, and most of the problems on this list will be back on the new site within two years unless something changes about who keeps it updated. If your site is accurate, loads on a phone, and has a working contact form, it’s doing its job. Rebuild when the business has genuinely outgrown it — not because the footer says 2021.

Which of these is most commonly broken?

Contact forms. It’s the only item on the list that’s invisible from the outside — everything else you can spot just by looking. Send yourself a test message today, and check the spam folder before you decide it’s fine.

11 Signs Your Website Is Quietly Costing You Customers

Eleven things to check on your own website in fifteen minutes — old hours, dead phone numbers, broken forms — and the quickest fix for each one.

July 26, 20269 min read

Most small-business websites aren’t bad. They’re just old. They were accurate on the day they went live, and then the business kept moving and the website didn’t. Nobody notices, because you never look at your own site — you already know your hours.

The people looking at it don’t know anything. They’re deciding whether to call you based entirely on what’s on that page. Here are eleven things worth checking, with the fastest fix for each. Set a timer for fifteen minutes.

How to run this in fifteen minutes

Do it on your phone, not your computer — most people who find a local business are on one, and your site can look different there. Use a private tab so you see it the way a stranger does.

Your phone, in a private tab — this is what a customer actually sees.
A notepad. Don’t fix anything yet; just write down what’s wrong.
Fifteen minutes. If you start editing halfway through, you’ll never finish the list.

Signs your information is quietly wrong

These are the expensive ones. A dated layout just looks careless. Wrong information actively sends people somewhere else — or sends them to your door at the wrong time.

1. The copyright year in the footer is old

Scroll to the very bottom of your homepage. If it says 2021, that’s the fastest signal a visitor gets that nobody’s home. People read a stale year as evidence the whole business is stale — and they notice, because it’s the one date on the page anybody knows how to read.

Fastest fix: change it to the current year — and get it set up so it updates itself, because otherwise you’re back here next January.

2. Your hours were never updated after you changed them

Think about the last time your hours changed — a seasonal shift, a new closing day, the week after Christmas. Did the website change too? Usually the Google listing gets updated and the website doesn’t, so now there are two different answers out there in public.

This one costs you twice. Someone turns up when you’re closed and is annoyed at you, or assumes you’re closed when you’re open and goes elsewhere. Fastest fix: correct them, then pick one place as the master copy and make everything else match it.

3. The phone number rings somewhere it shouldn’t

Actually call it. Tap the number on your own site and let it ring. Owners switch carriers, add a second line, or move everything to a mobile — and the old number sits in the footer of every page for years afterwards.

A customer who calls a dead number doesn’t call twice. They call the next business on the list. Fastest fix: call every number on the site, including the one in the footer and any on the contact page. They’re often not the same number.

4. Your prices are from two years ago

If you publish prices, they age faster than anything else. An old number creates an ugly conversation where you have to talk someone up from a figure they’d already agreed to in their head — and you look like you’re making it up.

Fastest fix: update them, or swap exact figures for a starting-from price or a range you’re comfortable holding for a year. If you say “starting at,” mean it — a starting price nobody has ever actually paid is just a different kind of wrong.

5. There are photos of people who don’t work here anymore

Team pages rot quietly. Someone left eighteen months ago and their face is still the second thing on the About page. It’s awkward for you, confusing for the customer who asks for them by name, and unfair to the person who left.

Fastest fix: remove anyone who’s gone. If the page looks thin afterwards, leave it thin. A small honest team page beats a padded one, and “it’s me and one apprentice” is a perfectly good thing for a customer to know.

Signs something is actually broken

6. Nobody has tested the contact form since launch

This is the one that quietly costs the most, because it fails silently. Forms stop delivering for boring reasons — an email address changed, a mailbox filled up, messages started going to spam. Nothing tells the visitor it failed. They see “Thanks, we’ll be in touch” and wait for a call that’s never coming.

Fastest fix: fill it in right now, the way a customer would, with a real message. Then check your inbox and your spam folder. Put a reminder in your calendar to do it again every few months.

7. Links that go nowhere

Tap every item in your menu, then every button on the homepage. You’re looking for pages that error, buttons that do nothing, and links to things that no longer exist — a supplier who rebuilt their site, a Facebook page you deleted.

Fastest fix: start with the main menu, since those get tapped most. Anything broken that’s no longer relevant is fine to simply delete — a missing link is invisible, a broken one isn’t.

8. There’s no padlock in the address bar

Look at the top of the browser while your site is open. If you see “Not secure” instead of a padlock, browsers are telling your visitors your site isn’t safe before they’ve read a word of it. Some put a full-page warning in front of it entirely.

This isn’t only about card payments — a plain contact form counts, and search engines prefer secure sites. Fastest fix: whoever hosts your site has to switch on a certificate. It’s routine and usually free, but it isn’t something you can change from the page itself.

Signs it’s painful to use on a phone

9. You have to pinch and zoom to read anything

If the text is tiny, or the page is wider than the screen so you have to drag sideways to read a sentence, that site was designed on a big monitor and never checked on a phone. Your customer is usually standing up, one-handed and in a hurry.

Fastest fix: check the three things that matter first — the phone number, the address, and the main button. If those are readable and tappable without zooming, you’re most of the way there even if the rest is imperfect.

10. Photos take forever to load

Photos straight off a modern phone are enormous — far larger than a website needs. On your office wifi nobody notices. On a weak signal in a car park, the page sits blank while a picture of your storefront downloads, and people give up.

Fastest fix: turn wifi off and load your homepage on mobile data. Whatever appears last is what needs shrinking. Images can usually be made a fraction of the size with no visible difference at all.

The sign that makes people think you’ve closed down

11. Your “Latest News” section is years old

A news section whose newest post is from 2022 is worse than not having one. A site with no blog is just a simple site. A site with a dated “Latest” section has a timestamp on it — and it says nobody has been here in years.

The same goes for an events page listing something that already happened, or a banner promoting last year’s special. Fastest fix: if you won’t post regularly, take the section down. Nobody will miss it.

What to fix first

You’ll probably finish with six or seven things written down. Don’t try to do them all this week — do them in this order.

Anything wrong that a customer will act on: phone number, hours, address, prices.
Anything broken on the path to contacting you: the form, the menu links, the padlock.
Anything that makes the site look abandoned: the footer year, the stale news section, staff who left.
Everything else: slow photos, small text, tidying up.

The first two groups are costing you real customers this month. The third costs you the ones who were nearly convinced. The fourth is worth doing and isn’t urgent.

Some of these you can do yourself in a few minutes, assuming you can still log in. Others need whoever hosts or built the site.

The fix	Can you do it yourself?
Hours, prices, phone number, footer year	Yes, if you can log in and edit text.
Removing old staff or a stale news section	Usually. It’s deleting, not building.
Broken links and menu items	Yes, once you know which are broken.
Shrinking oversized photos	Sometimes — depends how the site was built.
Turning on the padlock (HTTPS)	No — whoever hosts your site does this.
Making the whole site work on phones	No — that’s a build-level change, not an edit.

None of this is difficult. That’s exactly why it’s so common. Every item on the list is a five-minute job that never quite becomes anyone’s job — so it waits. And while it waits, it sits there telling people something untrue about your business.

Common questions

How often should I check my website?: Twice a year is enough for most small businesses, plus any time something real changes — new hours, new prices, a staff change, a new number. Put a recurring reminder in your calendar for January and July. The January one conveniently catches the copyright year too.
Does an out-of-date website hurt my Google ranking?: Parts of it do. Search engines can tell when a site is slow, insecure, or awkward on a phone, and those count against you. Wrong hours or an old price won’t directly change your ranking — but they’ll lose you the customer who found you anyway, which is the part that actually matters.
The person who built my site is long gone. Where do I even start?: Find out two things: who your domain name is registered with, and who hosts the site. They’re usually two separate bills from two separate companies, and whoever controls those accounts controls your website. If you can’t remember either, search your email for the renewal invoices — the address they go to is normally the account holder.
Is it worth fixing an old site, or should I just get a new one?: Fix first. A rebuild takes weeks and real money, and most of the problems on this list will be back on the new site within two years unless something changes about who keeps it updated. If your site is accurate, loads on a phone, and has a working contact form, it’s doing its job. Rebuild when the business has genuinely outgrown it — not because the footer says 2021.
Which of these is most commonly broken?: Contact forms. It’s the only item on the list that’s invisible from the outside — everything else you can spot just by looking. Send yourself a test message today, and check the spam folder before you decide it’s fine.