It still loads, so it must be fine
A website that has not been touched in three years usually is not broken. It is just quietly wrong, and that costs more than downtime.
Somebody calls asking about a service you stopped offering in 2022. Then somebody else asks for a price you have not charged since before the last two rounds of supplier increases. Then a woman asks for the technician who left eighteen months ago.
Your website is not broken. It loads fine. It is just describing a business that does not exist anymore, and it has been doing that patiently, every day, to everyone who looks you up.
This is the actual failure mode for small business websites. Not hacking, not crashes. Just slow, silent inaccuracy, and the fact that nothing looks wrong from the outside is exactly why it goes on for years.
What decays, in order of what it costs you
Prices. The most expensive one. Either you honour a price you no longer charge, or you have an awkward conversation before the job even starts. Both cost you.
Services. Both directions hurt. Things you no longer do bring in enquiries you have to turn away. Things you started doing since bring in nothing, because nobody knows.
People. Staff pages age badly. Somebody asking for a technician who left two years ago is a small embarrassment, but it tells the customer something about how closely you are watching.
Hours. Especially if they changed seasonally and never changed back. Worse when your website and your Google listing disagree, because then you have two answers and no way for a customer to know which is right.
The phone number. Sounds unlikely until you remember how many businesses updated their number on Google and never touched the website. Every call to the old number is a customer who tried.
The technical things that do genuinely fail
Three, and only three, matter much on a simple site.
The SSL certificate. This is the padlock in the address bar. When it lapses, every visitor gets a full screen browser warning saying the connection is not private. Most people back out immediately, and a perfectly ordinary business ends up looking dangerous. It is sudden and it is total.
The contact form. Forms stop delivering for all sorts of reasons and none of them announce themselves. The form submits, the thank you appears, the message goes nowhere.
The domain renewal. A card expires, the notice goes to an inbox nobody checks, and the site simply stops existing.
Everything else on a simple site tends to keep working indefinitely. Static pages sitting on a server do not rot the way people imagine.
The speed thing, honestly
Your site did not get slower. Phones got faster and people got less patient.
A site built in 2019 that was perfectly acceptable then can feel sluggish now, particularly on a phone on mobile data, which is how most people will see it. And Google does take page speed into account, though less dramatically than the people selling speed optimisation suggest.
The practical test is not a score out of a hundred. Open your own site on your phone, off wifi, and count. If you are still waiting after four or five seconds, that is a problem worth fixing. If it loads in two, ignore anyone trying to sell you performance work.
The honest bit
We build websites and we are not going to pretend that a three year old site is automatically a crisis. A simple site can sit untouched for years and keep doing its job perfectly well, provided the information on it is still true and the three technical things above are holding.
The question is not how old the site is. It is whether what it says is still accurate.
A five year old site with correct prices, correct hours and a working contact form is doing better than a one year old site that nobody has updated since launch.
The thirty minute audit
Do this yourself, on a phone, with a pen.
- Read every page as a customer would. Note anything untrue. Prices, services, staff, hours, claims about how long you have been in business.
- Tap the phone number. Does it dial the right line?
- Submit the contact form with a real message, then check the inbox and the spam folder.
- Check the padlock in the address bar. If there is a warning, deal with it today.
- Compare the hours on your site against your Google listing. They should match exactly.
- Count how long it takes to load off wifi.
Most of what you find will be content, and most of it you can fix yourself if you have access. If you do not have access, that is a separate problem and worth sorting out before it becomes urgent.
Then put a date in the calendar
Twice a year, thirty minutes, same audit. Spring and autumn works for most businesses because that is usually when hours and prices change anyway.
That is the whole maintenance requirement for a simple site that is otherwise in good shape. Everything else is either automatic or somebody else's job.
If you go through the list and find you cannot change any of it because nobody has the login, we cover that in the free review too.
Call +1 506-801-9970 or email info@qhike.ca. We serve Fredericton, Moncton, Saint John and all of New Brunswick.