19 October 2026
The website nobody has touched in two years
A website does not break all at once. It drifts. The business moves on, the site stays where it was left, and the gap widens a little every month. Nobody notices, because the owner stopped checking once it went live. The customer sees it once, makes a judgement and moves on.
Around two years is when the drift starts to show. What follows is what has usually gone wrong by then, in roughly the order we check it.
The contact form that sends to nobody
On most business sites the contact form matters more than anything else on the page. It is also the first thing to fail without anyone noticing. The page still loads. The button still says "Sent". The message goes nowhere.
The causes are dull ones. The form delivers to the inbox of someone who left last year. The mail provider tightened its rules and now files the site's messages as spam. A plugin update reset the form's settings. A third-party form service retired the plan the site was on and stopped forwarding anything.
Phone and email links fail the same way. A number with one digit wrong. The mobile of a manager who has moved on. An email link pointing at an old domain that nobody renewed.
The check is simple. Fill in the form yourself, from a phone, using an address that is not the one it delivers to. Then go and find the message. If it landed in spam, count that as a failure. Customers do not ring up to ask whether you received their enquiry. They ring the next business on the list.
Opening hours, and the other facts that go stale
Hours change. Addresses change. The bank holiday notice from Christmas 2024 is still sitting at the top of the homepage. Each one is minor on its own. Together they tell a visitor that nobody is minding the place.
The bigger problem is disagreement. Your Google Business Profile shows one set of hours and your website shows another. A customer cannot tell which is right, so they trust neither. Pick one source of truth and update everything else from it on the same day.
Other things to look for:
- A copyright line in the footer that still reads 2023.
- "Established twelve years" when it is now fourteen.
- Staff named on the About page who no longer work there.
- Trade body or accreditation logos for memberships that have lapsed.
- A news page whose last post is from two summers ago.
Not one of these is technical. They are just facts that were true when the site was written.
Pages that describe a business you no longer run
This one hides better than the others. Over two years most businesses shift what they do. A service gets dropped because it was never worth the trouble. Another grows until it is most of the work. The website still describes the business as it was on launch day.
That matters beyond appearance. Search engines can only send people to pages that exist. If commercial work is now half your enquiries and the site only talks about domestic jobs, the commercial searches go to someone else. If you stopped offering a service but the page is still up, you will keep getting calls for work you have to turn down.
Galleries drift too. Photos of a van you sold. Projects from a range you no longer stock. Testimonials that are all dated 2022.
A useful exercise is to write down the five things you most want to be asked for this year. Then find the page on your site that covers each one. Where there is no page, that is the gap.
The layer underneath
Behind the visible content sits a set of accounts and renewals. Nobody thinks about them until one runs out.
The domain renews once a year, usually on a card. Cards expire. When the renewal fails the site goes dark, and so does any email on that domain. The security certificate behind the padlock in the browser bar renews on its own schedule. When it lapses, visitors get a full-page "Not secure" warning before they see anything of yours.
Sites built on a content management system need updates. A WordPress site left two years without plugin updates is a common target for automated attacks. The usual sign is spam pages appearing under your domain, which search engines notice before you do.
Then there is access. The person who built the site may have moved on. The hosting account may be registered to a personal email that nobody checks any more. If you do not know where your domain is registered, who can log in and when it renews, find out before you need to know. It is far easier to sort out on a quiet afternoon than on the morning the site goes down.
What to check first
If you have half an hour, go through these in order. The early ones lose you enquiries soonest.
- Send yourself a test enquiry through the contact form and confirm it arrives in the inbox, not the spam folder.
- On a phone, tap every phone number and email link on the site.
- Compare opening hours, address and phone number against your Google Business Profile and fix whichever is wrong.
- Read the services page out loud. Strike out anything you no longer do and note anything missing.
- Confirm who holds the logins for the domain and hosting, and write down both renewal dates.
- Look for anything with a date on it: footer, notices, news, testimonials.
- Open the site on your own phone and try to do the one thing a customer most often wants to do.
Most sites turn up two or three problems on this list. Very few turn up none.
When it is more than a tidy-up
Sometimes the list gives you an afternoon of edits and the site is sound again. Sometimes it shows something deeper. The site is built on a system nobody can now log into. The structure was designed around a business that has since changed shape. Every fix exposes another.
At that point a rebuild is usually less work than repairing the old site, and it gives you a site that describes the business as it is now. We cover how we approach that on our web development page. It covers how the content is planned, how handover works and how the site stays easy to update afterwards.
We build and maintain websites for businesses around Sutton Coldfield, Great Barr and further afield. If you ran through the checklist and found more than you expected, you are welcome to get in touch and we can go through it with you.