Our website isn’t broken, so why does it feel like it’s stopped working?

Every few weeks somebody rings us with a version of the same sentence. The website is fine. It loads, the pages are all there, nothing looks obviously wrong. And yet the phone has gone quiet, the contact form has stopped pinging, and the whole thing feels as though it has quietly stopped earning its keep.

That’s an awkward position to be in, because there’s nothing to point at. A broken website gives you a job to do. A working website that has stopped working for you gives you a shrug.

So before anyone talks you into a rebuild, it’s worth working out which of three very different problems you actually have.

Broken, ineffective, or invisible?

Broken is the easy one. Something is technically wrong: the form doesn’t send, the site falls over on phones, the security certificate has expired and browsers are warning people off. Usually quick to find and quick to fix.

Ineffective means people are arriving and leaving without doing anything. The visitors are there. The enquiries aren’t.

Invisible means nobody is arriving in the first place. The site could be superb and it wouldn’t matter, because it isn’t turning up where people are looking.

Those three need completely different responses, and only one of them is ever solved by a new design.

Five questions that usually find it

1. Have visits fallen, or have enquiries fallen?

From behind the counter these feel identical. They are not the same problem at all. Google Search Console and Google Analytics will both tell you free of charge, and if neither is connected to your site, that on its own is worth fixing this week. A website with no measurement is a business with no idea which half of its advertising is working.

If visits are steady and enquiries have dropped, look at the website. If visits have dropped, look at where you appear.

2. When did you last test your own contact form?

We’re slightly embarrassed by how often this turns out to be the answer. Forms stop delivering for dull reasons: an email address changed, a mailbox filled up, a spam filter got stricter, a plugin updated itself. Nothing on the page looks any different. Enquiries simply evaporate somewhere between the visitor and your inbox.

Send yourself one now, from your phone, on mobile data rather than the office wifi. Then check the junk folder. Do it again after any change to the site, and once a quarter regardless.

3. Does the site answer the questions people ask you on the phone?

Write down the five things customers ask before they commit. Prices, or at least a range. Whether you cover their village. How soon you could start. Whether you’re insured, accredited or DBS checked. What happens if something goes wrong.

Now go and find those five answers on your own website. If you can’t find them inside a minute, neither can anyone else, and a redesign won’t put them there.

4. Can somebody contact you in one action, from any page?

Not from the contact page. From wherever they happen to be standing when they decide. A phone number that dials when tapped, an email address, a short form. If your number only appears in the footer in small grey type, you’re asking people to work for the privilege of giving you money.

5. Has your website changed, or has everything around it?

This is the one people miss. Your site can sit perfectly still while the ground moves underneath it. A competitor starts advertising. Google reshuffles what it shows for your sort of search. Your Google Business Profile gets suspended, or quietly loses the category that was doing all the work. An old directory listing with your previous phone number climbs back up the results.

When a rebuild is the wrong answer

A good proportion of the websites we’re asked to replace don’t need replacing. The usual culprits:

• The content, not the design. The pages are handsome and say nothing.
• Three missing pages. A service with no page of its own can’t be found by anyone searching for that service.
• A silent contact form, as above.
• A Google Business Profile that’s unverified, duplicated, or still pointing at an address the business left in 2019.
• Photographs. Fifteen stock images of people who have never been to Shropshire, where eight honest pictures of the actual work would do considerably more.

None of those is a design problem. A beautiful new website containing the same content will disappoint you in exactly the same way, roughly four months from now.

When a rebuild genuinely is the answer

There are honest reasons to start again:

• You can’t change anything yourself, and every small edit means waiting on somebody else.
• It’s genuinely painful to use on a phone, which is where most of your visitors are.
• The business has changed. You do three things now and the website describes one of them.
• It runs on something nobody supports any more, so the security risk is real rather than theoretical.
• It’s slow because of the way it was built, not because of one oversized photograph.

If two or more of those are true, rebuilding is usually the cheaper route rather than the more expensive one.

If you do rebuild, keep what already works

Take your existing web addresses with you. Every page that sits at an address people and search engines already know should either keep that address or redirect to its replacement. Losing that is the most common way a business goes backwards by getting a smarter website.

Take the content that earns its keep, too. The page nobody liked the look of might be the page bringing in half the enquiries. You can only know that if you look before you delete.

The unglamorous summary

Most quiet websites aren’t broken and don’t need replacing. They need a working form, three missing pages, honest photographs, clearer prices and a reason to be found. That’s a fortnight of unfashionable work rather than a project.

If you’d like a second opinion, we’re happy to look and tell you it doesn’t need rebuilding. We’d rather do that than sell you something you didn’t need. Get in touch and describe the symptom rather than the cure.

If the maths is what’s bothering you, our five-year cost comparison takes the cost question apart properly. If the problem turns out to be that nobody can find you, start with why you show up in one town and not another instead. And if you’re not sure who is supposed to be fixing any of this, our explainer on website support is worth ten minutes.