Nice website... What's it for?

You wouldn't take on a salesperson and never once check whether they sold anything. You wouldn't sign a lease on a shopfront and never check the numbers of who walked through the door.

Yet plenty of businesses will spend five figures on a website and never ask it a single question. For a lot of small companies, it's the biggest line in the marketing budget and the only one nobody measures.

If you've done a few business shows, you'll know the conversation that follows from this. Someone asks what I do. I tell them we build websites. And they say, "Ah, we've got one of those."

One of those. Sitting there. Doing very little.

Nine times out of ten the rest of the story is identical. Built two or three years ago. Cost more than expected. Looks quite nice. Nobody has touched it since, nobody can tell you what it brought in last month, and nobody is entirely sure who would know.

Frankly, that's an expensive business card that happens to live online.

The question nobody asks at sign-off

When a new site goes live, everyone asks the same thing: does it look good? Almost nobody asks the more useful questions - what job is this actually doing for us? How hard can we make it work for the business?

It's easy to skip, because the answer can be uncomfortable. But it's the difference between an asset and an ornament.

What "working harder" actually looks like

It isn't more pages, more features, or another rebuild every eighteen months. In our experience it's four things.

It has a job. One primary thing you want a visitor to do. The close - book the call, request the quote, apply for the role. Say it out loud, entice them to take action, and every decision after that gets easier.

You can see whether it's doing that job. Traffic is not a result - it’s nice, can even be exciting, but does it pay the bills? Enquiries, booked calls, and the percentage of visitors who take the action you named - those are results. If you can't see them, you're guessing, and guessing is expensive.

It's joined up with everything else. Your LinkedIn posts, your email, your ads, the conversations you have at events - they all end up sending someone to your site. If the page they land on doesn't continue that conversation, you've paid for the attention then sent them into a maze.

It gets looked after. Small, regular improvements beat a big redesign every time. A page rewritten because you noticed people leaving it is worth more than a whole new homepage nobody asked for.

Before you commission the rebuild

Plenty of our enquiries start with "our site looks dated, we need a new one." Sometimes that's true. Often it isn't. Often the site looks perfectly fine and the real problem is that it was never pointed at anything - no clear job, no measurement, no follow-up. Rebuilding it without fixing that just buys you a better-looking version of the same silence.

So, before you spend the money, try three questions. What is this site for? How would I know if it was working? When did we last change anything because of what the numbers told us?

If those are hard to answer, you've found your starting point. And it almost certainly costs less than a rebuild.

Jolly Good Web are excited to grow your business from our office in Lincoln. You’ll find us honest, transparent, and a good deal more interested in what your website does for your growth than in how it looks in our portfolio. We’ll even conduct a technical website audit, free of charge - grab it here.