The five things on every website that go out of date

Websites do not break. They drift. Nothing errors, nothing goes offline, and the site quietly stops describing the organisation it belongs to — one changed fact at a time, until a customer turns up at a closed door holding a price you stopped charging two years ago.

Five things account for nearly all of it. Here is what each one costs when it is wrong, and a routine that keeps on top of them in about ten minutes a month.

1. Opening hours

The most consequential wrong fact on any website, because it is the one people act on immediately and physically.

Someone reads that you are open until six, travels across town, and finds you closed. You have not merely lost that visit — you have taught them that your information cannot be trusted, and that is the thing they will mention when your name comes up.

What goes stale:

• Seasonal changes. Winter timings that were set last year and never reverted.
• Government holidays and local closures.
• The lunch break, which often exists in practice and never on the site.
• “Open 24 hours” written optimistically during a busy season.

2. Prices

Out-of-date prices produce an argument at the point of payment, which is the worst possible place to have one. The customer is not being difficult — they read your number and planned around it.

If a price is going up, change it on the site the day it changes, not the week after. And if you genuinely cannot keep individual prices current, publish a range and the date: “Rates from Nu. 2,500 — updated August 2026.” A dated range is honest and stays honest. An undated exact figure quietly becomes a lie.

Also check anything derived from a price: package deals, discounts that ended, a “special offer” banner from a festival two seasons ago.

3. People

Staff pages age badly and nobody notices, because you already know who works there.

The costs are real: a customer asks for someone who left eighteen months ago; an email address on the site still points to a person who has gone, so enquiries land in an unread mailbox; a new colleague who has been there a year is still not listed and is treated as junior by everyone who checked the site first.

That unread mailbox deserves emphasis. An email address on a website that nobody reads is worse than no address — it silently absorbs the enquiries you most wanted.

4. Offers, notices and anything with a date in it

Every temporary thing put on a website is put there with genuine intent to remove it later, and roughly half of them are still there years on.

• Festival offers.
• “Closed for renovation until…” — where the date has passed.
• Announcement bars, which are designed to be noticed and therefore do the most damage when stale.
• Events in an events list that already happened.

Give every temporary thing an end date when you create it, written in your calendar, not in your memory. Two minutes at creation saves the embarrassment of a New Year offer running in July.

5. Contact details

The quietest failure of all, because a wrong number produces no complaint — the person simply cannot reach you and you never find out.

Check, properly, by using them:

• Phone the number on your own site. Not the one you know — the one that is printed. Do you answer?
• Email the address on your own site, from a personal account. Does it arrive, and does somebody read it?
• Submit your own contact form. This one fails more often than any of the others, especially after a change of email provider, and it fails silently.
• Follow your own map link. Does it land on your building?
• Check the messaging number, if you list WhatsApp or similar.

Do this once a quarter. It takes five minutes and it is the highest-value maintenance in this guide, because everything else on the site exists to produce a contact.

The routine

Monthly — ten minutes

1. Read your homepage on your phone as though you had never seen it.
2. Are the hours right for this month, including anything seasonal?
3. Is any offer, notice or banner still true?
4. Are the prices the prices you charged today?
5. Click every link in the navigation. Anything dead or empty?

Quarterly — twenty minutes

1. The full contact test above: phone it, email it, submit the form, follow the map.
2. Is the staff list current?
3. Are the photographs still of what the place actually looks like?
4. Is anything described as “new” more than a year old?

Yearly — an hour

1. Read every page, end to end. You will find things.
2. Check the copyright year in the footer, if you show one.
3. Confirm your domain's renewal date and that the renewal contact is still someone who works there.
4. Ask someone outside the business to find four facts on your site, and watch.
5. Look at what your services list says versus what you actually sell now. This drifts more than anything else.

Two habits that prevent most of it

Change the site at the same moment you change the thing. When the price rises, update it before you leave the office. When someone joins, add them in their first week. Batched maintenance is maintenance that does not happen.

Make sure more than one person can edit it. The most common reason a site goes stale is not laziness — it is that the only person who can change it is busy, or has left. If updating your website requires emailing an agency and waiting three days, it will not happen for small things, and small things are what go wrong.

One page worth adding

If your organisation has anything that changes regularly — seasonal menus, room availability, class times, a closure — give it its own page and say when it was last checked. “Checked 1 September 2026” at the bottom tells a visitor exactly how much to trust it, which is more useful than silence in both directions.

It also creates a small obligation. A date that is visibly six months old is uncomfortable to look at, and that discomfort is what gets the page updated.