When your website no longer represents your business

There is a specific moment we see often. A firm has been doing good work for years, the kind that should bring in more of the same, and a prospective client says “I looked at your website and was not sure you did that”. The site is not broken. It is just describing a smaller company that no longer exists.

How it happens

Websites get built at a moment and then frozen. The first version describes the services you offered at launch, shows the work you had then, and speaks in the tone that felt right at the time. The business moves. Nobody has a reason to go back to the site until something forces it. Meanwhile every new prospect meets the old company first.

The gap shows up in predictable places:

• The services list is what you offered in year one. The thing you are now best known for is a footnote, or missing.
• The portfolio is early work. Your best three projects from the last two years are not on it.
• The photos and the team page are from a different era of the company, sometimes with people who left.
• The tone is either more corporate or more casual than the firm you have become.
• The site targets the customers you had, not the ones you want now.

What it costs

Two things. Leads that go elsewhere because the site did not confirm what the referral said, and leads that arrive for the wrong work because the site still advertises it. The second one is quieter and more expensive: every hour spent quoting for jobs you no longer want is an hour not spent on the ones you do.

How to check in an hour

Ask three people who know the business well but did not build the site, one of them a recent client, to open it and describe the company back to you in three sentences. If what they describe is not the company you run, the site is out of date, whatever it looks like.

Then look at the last ten enquiries. How many were for the work you actually want? If it is under half, the site is aiming at the wrong people.

What to keep, and what to change

This is where people over-correct and throw everything away. Keep:

• Page addresses that rank. If the services page has years of links and search visibility, keep it at the same address and change what is on it.
• The name and the logo, unless you are genuinely rebranding. A site can be entirely new around a mark people recognise.
• Anything that is still true. Good testimonials, accurate case studies, real numbers.

Change:

• The first screen. It should say what you do now, for whom, in your current tone.
• The services, ordered by what you want more of, not by history.
• The work shown, to the best recent projects, with a line on what each one involved.
• The photos, to current people and current premises. Stock imagery of nobody in particular is worse than a decent phone photo of the real team.

Redesign or rebuild

If the foundation is sound, this is a redesign with new content, and it is one of the most satisfying jobs we do because the improvement is so visible. If the platform is also old or you cannot edit it yourself, it becomes a rebuild, and the content work is the same either way. The scanner will tell you which foundation you have. The three-sentence test will tell you whether the content has drifted.