When your business outgrows its website
Most websites are built for a particular version of a business. At the time, the structure makes sense. The services reflect what you sell, the homepage explains roughly what you want to be known for, and the examples are reasonably current.
But businesses change. New services get added and others become less important. You start working with different clients, or doing more sophisticated work for the same ones. You get clearer about the work you want and what you’re particularly good at.
The website changes too, but usually in pieces. A page gets added here, some copy gets rewritten there, a new case study goes up. Things that are no longer quite right stay because they’re not wrong enough to remove. Eventually you can end up with a website that is still broadly accurate, but no longer does a particularly good job of selling the business you’ve become.
Nothing has to be obviously wrong
This is what makes the problem easy to live with. The website might look fine, the information is mostly correct, and there isn’t a broken page or terrible piece of design that obviously needs fixing.
Instead, you start compensating for it. You explain on calls that a service isn’t really the focus anymore. You send people directly to a particular case study because you don’t trust them to find the right thing themselves. You describe the business differently in proposals. Recent work doesn’t fit neatly into the service structure. Perhaps you hesitate slightly before giving somebody the URL.
The business has moved on, but its main way of introducing itself hasn’t quite caught up. That can have a commercial cost because a prospect doesn’t know about the explanation you’re going to give them once you’re on a call. They only know what you’ve chosen to put in front of them.
Websites accumulate old decisions
A website can become a surprisingly good record of a business’s history. There’s the service you were pushing three years ago, the page added for an audience you wanted to reach, the wording from an earlier positioning exercise and the navigation item nobody has quite had the confidence to remove. Newer things get layered on top.
None of the individual decisions needs to be bad. The problem is that websites are generally better at accumulating things than shedding them. Eventually the structure starts describing how the business got here rather than where it is now.
Signs your website no longer reflects your business
I’d start looking at the site as a whole if several of these patterns feel familiar:
Patterns to watch for
- You regularly have to qualify what the website says. The explanation you give prospects now is better than the one on the site.
- Your best work doesn’t fit neatly into the existing structure. Recent projects demonstrate something the current service categories don’t quite capture.
- New things keep being added without older things disappearing. The site gets bigger without getting clearer.
- Different pages seem to describe slightly different businesses. They were written at different points, with different priorities.
- People can understand what you do, but not why they should choose you. The facts are there, but the value isn’t coming through strongly enough.
- There are pages you’d rather prospects didn’t see first. They’re not necessarily wrong; they just don’t represent you particularly well anymore.
- The business has become more focused, but the website hasn’t. Everything still gets roughly equal weight.
None of this automatically means the answer is a new website. Quite often, that’s the next assumption worth questioning.
A redesign might not be the answer
If the website feels behind the business, it’s easy to conclude that it needs redesigning, and sometimes it does. But a redesign won’t decide which services matter most, resolve two competing ways of describing the business or decide which audience you really want to reach.
If years of reasonable decisions have accumulated without anything being removed, rebuilding all of them into a new website doesn’t solve very much. It’s another example of why it’s worth asking whether the obvious problem is actually the problem before committing to the solution.
Sometimes the work is smaller: remove a service, restructure a few pages, sharpen the proposition, bring better evidence forward or make the route to enquiry clearer. Sometimes it’s bigger, because trying to sort out the website exposes questions about the business itself.
Which work do we actually want more of? Who are we trying to reach now? What do we want to be known for? Which things are we still talking about because they matter, and which are there because they’ve always been there?
Those aren’t really website questions, but websites have a habit of forcing them into the open. At that point, it can be more useful to step back and review what’s actually going on than to keep making changes to individual pages.
Your website has to make choices
This is one of the reasons I find websites useful as a way into these problems. A business can contain plenty of nuance and contradiction, but a website has to turn some of that into a hierarchy.
Something has to go in the navigation and something doesn’t. Something has to lead the homepage. One case study gets shown before another and one audience gets spoken to more directly. Avoid making those choices and everything starts to look equally important.
A useful exercise is to forget the existing site for a moment and ask:
If we were explaining the business as it exists today, would we organise it the same way?
Would the same services lead? Would you choose the same examples? Would you talk to the same audiences? Would you even use the same categories?
If not, that’s probably more useful to understand than whether the website looks dated.
Bring the website back to the business
A website doesn’t need to contain everything that’s true about a business. It needs to help the right people understand enough of the right things to decide whether to take the next step.
As the business changes, that means occasionally removing things as well as adding them, and questioning decisions that were perfectly sensible when they were made. The result might be a new website, or it might be a relatively small set of changes to the one you already have.
The important bit is knowing which problem you’re solving before you start.
Does your website still reflect the business?
If the site has accumulated over time and you’re not sure whether it needs a few changes or a more fundamental rethink, a Review is a good place to start.