It Won't Go Away on Its Own

I procrastinated getting to the dentist for regular checkups back in college. The cost, my course load, all the usual reasons. So a tooth that needed attention just went unattended — until one day it cracked. I had a jagged edge in my mouth, and there was no more putting it off. I ended up losing the tooth and getting fitted for a root canal. I could have avoided all of it if I'd just dealt with the problem when it first started.

Why businesses let their websites slide

Many business owners already know something's wrong with their website. They just haven't fixed it — time, effort, and money get in the way, and it's easier to tell yourself it'll hold up a little longer.

Sometimes it's a fix. Sometimes the site is old enough, or broken enough in enough places, that it's better to rebuild the whole thing. Either way, the problem doesn't fix itself by sitting there.

A website needs upkeep the same way anything you're running does — it's supposed to keep changing. Web design looked completely different even twenty years ago, and people's expectations have moved just as fast. More of your customers are on their phones than ever. If you don't know whether your site is actually responsive, your customers already do.

A website that sits dormant long enough becomes a target. Nobody's updating the plugins or the security protections anymore, which makes it easy prey for hackers. By the time you notice, the site can already be gone.

What I actually found on one site

I recently ran a CEWQI evaluation on a home builder's website. He was spending hundreds of dollars a month on automated marketing services but hadn't taken a close look at his own site. What I found: a 4-second average visit time, a high bounce rate, contrast issues and accessibility gaps, and excessive pop-ups. He relied on Instagram and word of mouth instead.

Word of mouth built a lot of businesses once, and it still matters. But it's not a website, and treating the two as interchangeable is exactly how a problem like this sits unaddressed for years instead of weeks.

The tooth didn't go away because I ignored it. Neither will a website problem. The fix now is almost always smaller than the fix later — the only real question is whether you deal with it while it's still just an inconvenience, or wait until it's an emergency.