When I surveyed the websites of 88 independent businesses around Newcastle-under-Lyme and Stoke-on-Trent, one category of fault came up far more than I expected, and it is the one nobody thinks to check. Not the design, not the speed, not anything a visitor would describe as a problem. Upkeep: the small signals scattered through a website that say when it was last touched.
Of the 72 websites that loaded and were scored on everything, 23 dropped the point for upkeep. That is just under a third. In practice that meant a copyright year several years out of date, a leftover page from the original template still sitting there, or a second copy of the website living at an address nobody meant to leave public.
I want to be clear about what this is and is not. Every one of those was a working website belonging to a business that was doing fine. This is not a fault in the sense of something being broken. It is a fault in the sense of a signal being sent that nobody intended to send, and that is worth knowing about precisely because it is so cheap to fix.
What the year in the footer actually does
The copyright line at the bottom of a website is not doing much legally. Copyright exists whether or not you write it down, and the year in the footer does not extend or shorten anything. If it disappeared tomorrow, nothing about your legal position would change.
What it does do is answer a question visitors ask without realising they are asking it: is this business still going, and is this information current.
Somebody landing on your website has to make that judgement in a few seconds, and they will use whatever is available. Most of your website gives them nothing to go on, because good information does not look dated. Your services have not changed. Your address has not changed. The photographs are fine. The one thing on the page that carries a date is the footer, so that is what gets used.
A footer reading three or four years ago does not make a visitor think your business has closed. It makes them slightly less certain, at a moment when you would prefer them to be certain. In the survey I saw years ranging from the recent past back to the early 2000s, on websites that were otherwise perfectly current and belonged to businesses that were plainly still trading.
This takes minutes and costs nothing. It is the single cheapest thing on the entire list of website faults I found, and the only reason it persists is that nobody looks at their own footer.
The other two
Leftover pages from the template. Most websites start from a template, and templates ship with example pages: a sample blog post, a placeholder team page, a demonstration of what a service listing could look like. These are supposed to be deleted or replaced during the build. Sometimes one gets missed, and because nothing links to it, nobody ever sees it again by using the website normally.
Search engines find them anyway. So a business can have a page in search results containing placeholder text about a fictional company, and no way of knowing, because you would only ever find it by searching for something you would never search for.
A second copy at an address you forgot about. Websites built on a platform usually get a working address before your real one is connected, something like yourbusiness.platform.com. When the real domain goes live, the working one frequently stays up, serving the same website. Now the same content exists at two addresses. Search engines have to decide which is the real one, and they do not always pick the one you would.
The related version is a copy left behind after a redesign, sitting on the old hosting, still serving the previous version of your website to anybody who finds it.
How to check your own
Twenty minutes, and none of it needs any technical knowledge.
- Scroll to the bottom of your homepage and read the footer. Check the year, and while you are there check the phone number and address, which go stale the same way.
- Search for your business name in a search engine and look past the first result. If you see a second entry pointing at an address that is not your domain, that is a duplicate worth dealing with.
- Search for your domain with a site search. Type
site:followed by your domain into a search engine, with no space. That lists the pages a search engine knows about on your website. Look for anything you do not recognise, particularly anything with words like "sample", "example", "demo", "test" or "page" in the address. - Check the small print pages. Privacy notices and terms are usually written once and never opened again. They often carry a date, sometimes a previous business name, occasionally a different company's name entirely if they started from a template.
- Look at the page titles, the text that appears in the browser tab and as the headline in search results. Template defaults survive here more than anywhere else, because the title is not visible on the page itself.
Why this happens, and why it is not carelessness
Every one of these has the same shape. They are all invisible from the front.
Using your own website does not reveal any of them. You do not read your own footer, because you know what your business is called. You never visit the leftover template page, because nothing links to it. You never see the duplicate address, because you type your real domain. The page title is behind you in the browser tab while you look at the page.
So there is no moment in the normal life of a business when any of this surfaces. It is not that people are neglecting their websites. It is that these particular faults are structurally undetectable by the person best placed to fix them, which is exactly why a third of the websites I looked at had at least one.
That is also the encouraging part. This is not a category of problem that requires a rebuild, a redesign, or spending money. It is a category that requires somebody to look, once, on purpose. Put twenty minutes in the calendar once a year and it stops being a thing that can happen to you.