Is your website one of the undead?
Saturday 10th October is World Zombie Day, which seems as good an excuse as any to talk about the websites quietly shuffling along across Cambridgeshire. You know the sort. Nobody's touched them since 2021. The lights are technically on and they still load, mostly. There's just not much going on inside.
I call these zombie websites, and there are a lot of them about. They rarely come from neglect in any dramatic sense. The site went live, everyone breathed a sigh of relief, and then the actual business took over again. Months turn into years remarkably quickly when nobody's looking.
I'm in no position to be smug about this. My own marketing had a quiet patch while I was busy looking after everyone else's and my own marketing was absolutely the last thing on my mind, so I know exactly how it happens.
How to tell if yours has turned
Most of these take seconds to check.
The copyright date in the footer still says 2021. Or the "latest news" section leads with Christmas opening hours from three Christmases ago.
The team page includes people who left years ago. Worse, the contact form still sends enquiries to one of them.
The services listed don't match what you do now. Something you stopped offering is still there, and the thing you're busiest with isn't mentioned at all.
The blog stops abruptly. The last post says "watch this space", and the space has been watched, quietly, since 2022.
The photos show an old van, old premises, or a smiling stock-photo team in a boardroom you've never set foot in.
It looks fine on a laptop and falls apart on a phone, which is where a lot of people will see it first.
Why it matters more than it seems
Most people check a website before they pick up the phone, even when someone they trust has recommended you. What they're really checking is whether you're still trading and still do the thing they need. A site that's clearly been left alone raises a small doubt about both, and a small doubt is often enough for someone to try the next name on the list.
The contact form is the one that worries me most. An enquiry landing in an inbox nobody checks is a customer who'll assume you weren't interested, and you'll never know they asked.
Bringing it back to life
The good news is that most zombie websites can be revived without a rebuild. Usually what's missing is someone who looks at the site regularly.
Put a twenty-minute check in the diary once a quarter. Click every link, send yourself a test enquiry through the contact form, read the services page as if you were a customer, and have a look at it on your phone. Fix anything small there and then, and make a note of anything bigger.
Then decide who owns it. In a lot of small businesses the website belongs to everyone, which in practice means it belongs to nobody. Giving one person responsibility, even for a few minutes a month, makes more difference than any redesign.
If you'd rather hand the job over altogether, keeping websites up to date is part of the outsourced marketing support I provide for businesses across Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. Mind you, if yours still has a button asking people to follow you on Google+, it may be beyond help.
