What an out-of-date website tells your customers
Old prices, staff who left, a service you stopped offering. None of it looks broken, which is why it survives for years. Here is what it actually costs, what the law expects, and how to work through it.
Every inaccuracy is a reason to ring somebody else
A price that has gone up. An engineer who left in 2023. A service area that no longer includes the town they live in. Each one is a small moment where a customer decides you are not quite the right fit, and they never tell you why.
The search side matters too, but less than people claim. Google does not punish old pages — freshness is query-dependent, and a five-year-old page answering a question well will still rank. What hurts is thin coverage, wrong information, and a site that has stopped growing while competitors publish.
Five things that go stale without anyone noticing
- Service pages for things you no longer doPandemic-era offers, discontinued services, “call to book a Zoom consultation”. Remove them or redirect them — a page selling something you cannot deliver is worse than no page.
- PricesThe one customers check and the one most often left alone. If you cannot keep exact figures current, publish a range or a starting price and say when it was last reviewed.
- Contact details and service areasCheck them against your Google Business Profile. Disagreement between the two is one of the most common local search problems and it is free to fix.
- Blog posts with dates in the title“Top tips for 2020” ages badly and visibly. Either update and retitle, or remove.
- Legal pagesCookie notice, privacy notice, terms. Most were written once and never revisited. See below.
Three things that have actually changed
Worth being precise here, because a lot of what circulates on this subject is wrong. Advertising accuracy is not regulated by Ofcom — Ofcom handles broadcasting, telecoms and post. For a small business website, three things apply.
- UK GDPR and your privacy noticeIf you have a contact form you are collecting personal data, and you need a notice saying what you collect, why, how long you keep it and who else sees it. Templates copied before 2021 often still refer only to EU GDPR, which diverged after Brexit.
- PECR and cookie consentConsent must come before non-essential cookies are set, which means analytics and advertising tags must not fire until the visitor agrees. A banner saying “by continuing you accept” does not meet the standard.
- The DMCC Act 2024, from April 2025This replaced the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations and is now what governs misleading claims and reviews. If your site still advertises a price or an offer that is no longer available, that is the regime that covers it — not Ofcom, and not the old 2008 regulations most articles still cite.
We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. But these are three things we routinely find unaddressed, and all three are visible from the outside.
A content audit you can do in an afternoon
Not a spreadsheet exercise. Open your own site and work through it as a stranger would.
- List every pageSearch
site:yourwebsite.co.ukto see what Google actually holds. You will find pages you had forgotten. - Mark each one keep, fix or removeBe ruthless with remove. A page nobody reads and nobody links to is doing nothing for you.
- Check the facts on everything you keepPrices, services, areas, names, phone numbers. This is the bulk of the work and the bulk of the benefit.
- Redirect what you removeDo not just delete. Point each old URL at the nearest surviving page so anyone with a bookmark or a link still lands somewhere sensible.
- Then check nothing is brokenOur broken link checker will catch anything you missed in a couple of minutes.
Once a quarter after that, and it takes twenty minutes rather than an afternoon.
What the work looks like
Paramount Space Cleaning in Coventry came to us in October 2025 with a site that had barely changed since launch. Service pages, local pages, technical fixes and a Google Business Profile that had never been finished. In seven months they went from no visibility to position one for “deep cleaning coventry”, page one for 55 search terms, and a £7,000 commercial contract traced back to organic search.
The caveat we attach to everything: one business, one city, one sector that is competitive but not brutal. Not a forecast for anyone else. Nora approved every figure before we published it.
Simon & Lisa Batchelor run Get Your Website Seen. Simon spent ten years as owner and editor of a magazine, then built and sold Commerce Computers Ltd, a trade computer supplier that traded online as shop4it.co.uk. So we have been on the buying side of marketing that did not work, which is most of why this site reads the way it does. You deal with us directly, and every figure published here belongs to a client who approved it.
Not sure what needs updating?
The free audit lists what is out of date, what is worth keeping, and what to remove — including the legal pages above. Written by one of us. It is lead generation and we are not pretending otherwise, but you get it without a call first.
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