Sites rarely fail dramatically. They erode — a shortcut here, an unfinished page there, each one sensible on the day it happened, together adding up to a business that reads as unsure of itself. These are the seven we meet most often.

1. A site that accumulated rather than got built

Sites accumulate. A page here for a campaign, a page there for a service nobody sells any more, three overlapping pages about the same thing because each was written by a different person. Visitors cannot find what they need, and search engines cannot tell which page to show.

The fix: list every page, note its single purpose, and merge or remove anything that cannot justify itself. A smaller site where each page has a clear job almost always performs better than a large one that repeats itself.

2. A brand that ends at the logo file

A logo is chosen carefully; everything after it is improvised. Four shades of the same blue, three heading fonts, buttons that look different on every page. Visitors will not diagnose the inconsistency, but they will register it as carelessness.

The fix: write down a small set of decisions — two fonts, a short colour list, one button style, one heading scale — and apply them without exception. Restriction is what makes a brand look deliberate.

3. Copy aimed at the boardroom, not the buyer

Homepages frequently open with a sentence about the business — its founding year, its passion, its commitment to excellence — while the reader is still trying to establish what is sold here and whether it applies to them.

The fix: lead with what you do and who it is for, in plain words. Save the history for the page where someone has already decided they are interested. If a sentence could appear on a competitor's site unchanged, it is not doing any work.

4. Optimisation bolted on at the end

Content is written, published, and then somebody is asked to "add the SEO". By that point the structure is fixed, the headings answer nothing, and the page is competing with two others on the same site.

The fix: decide the question a page answers before writing it. Let that shape the title, the headings and the order of sections. Optimisation done at the planning stage is invisible; done afterwards it usually shows.

5. A layout that changes character page to page

The homepage is modern, the services page is from an older redesign, the blog uses a stock template nobody adjusted. Each page may be acceptable on its own; moving between them feels like moving between three different companies.

The fix: treat layout as a system — shared headers, a consistent spacing rhythm, the same card and button components everywhere. Consistency is also cheaper: it removes a decision from every new page.

6. A journey that only makes sense from the inside

Navigation labelled with internal vocabulary. A contact form requesting a budget before anyone has explained what the work involves. Important information hidden behind hover effects that do not exist on a phone. Each of these is obvious to the person who built it and baffling to everyone else.

The fix: watch someone unfamiliar use the site on their own phone without guidance. Two or three sessions will surface more useful problems than a month of internal discussion.

7. Presentation that sells the work short

Low-resolution images, screenshots with somebody's desktop clutter in the corner, product photographs in five different lighting conditions, text sitting on top of an image where it cannot be read. The work behind the business may be excellent; the presentation suggests otherwise.

The fix: fewer assets, prepared properly. One consistent set of images beats a gallery assembled from whatever was available, and plain type on a clean background beats an unreadable overlay every time.

And the one nobody counts: letting it go stale

One further habit quietly undoes the rest: treating a website as a project that finishes. Services change, prices change, staff leave, and the pages describing them stay as they were. A visitor who finds an outdated page has no way of knowing which parts of the site to trust, so they tend to discount all of it.

Maintenance does not need to be elaborate. A short review every few months — checking that service descriptions still match what you sell, that links still resolve, that the contact route still reaches someone — prevents most of the damage. It is far less work than the periodic rebuild that follows years of neglect, and it keeps the site useful in the meantime.

Why none of this gets fixed on its own

None of these problems survive because anyone defends them. They survive because each was a reasonable decision at the time, made under pressure, by someone with other work to finish. The page was needed for a launch. The photograph was the only one available. The form asked for a budget because a previous client wasted everybody's time.

That is also why occasional redesigns rarely solve them. A new theme changes the surface while the underlying habits — publishing without a purpose, deciding style page by page, writing for colleagues rather than customers — remain in place and slowly reproduce the same result. What actually helps is a small number of standing rules that make the careless version harder to do than the careful one.

A sensible order to tackle them

  • Audit before you add. Removing or merging weak pages usually beats publishing new ones.
  • One purpose per page, written at the top of the brief and checked before publishing.
  • One set of style decisions, applied everywhere without exception.
  • One honest test — someone outside the business, on their own phone, with no explanation.

You do not need to address all seven at once. Start with the pages that already receive visitors and the step where enquiries are lost — usually the gap between a service page and the contact form. Fix the clarity of those first, then work outwards. Most businesses find that the improvement comes less from adding anything new than from removing what was getting in the way.