Nobody complains about a quiet website

Referral businesses hide their website problems better than anyone. Been thinking about that one lately.

Work keeps arriving through relationships and reputation, so a quiet site reads as harmless. And the costs stay invisible by design. No report shows you the strangers who checked you out and moved on. Nobody mentions the stale services page they read on the way to answering your intro.

That second one is the part worth sitting with. Even a warm referral looks you up before writing back. The best pipeline you've got still crosses the surface nobody's been watching.

How a site goes quiet

Usually it happens slowly, and for pretty boring reasons.

The person who set it up moved on. The login lives in an old email thread. Changing anything means a few messages and a favor, so the changes stop, and somewhere in there the site became nobody's job.

Meanwhile the business keeps going. The offers sharpen, the process matures, your best clients change. The pages stay where they were, because keeping them caught up was never on anyone's list.

So you end up with a site that loads fine and describes the company you were two years ago. Nobody says anything, because nobody ever does. Absence of complaints is the one grade a quiet page always gets.

Three checks, about ten minutes

Good news is this tends to be one of the more fixable problems a business has. And you can find your own version of it this week, no budget and nobody's permission.

1. Ask the machine.
   Open ChatGPT or Claude and ask the question your best client asked right before they found you. Then read what comes back about you. That answer got assembled from whatever the engines could read about you and everybody you compete with. If your words aren't in there, you're not in the answer.
2. The one-word test.
   Pick one word on your homepage you'd want changed. Don't change it, just trace it. Who do you ask, how long does it take, how many people are in the chain? If it's more than one person and more than a day, you've found the thing that quietly governs everything else about the site.
3. Oldest page to newest page.
   Pull up the page you wrote first and the page you wrote most recently, and read them back to back. Count how many different companies are describing themselves. Two is common. Three isn't rare.

What usually comes of it

None of this needs a rebuild. The gaps tend to cluster in a handful of places / stale offers on the homepage / a process page from two pivots ago / a price that changed / answers a machine needs that live nowhere on the site.

An afternoon of work, once you can see them. The harder part is the ownership question underneath -- somebody has to be on a rhythm, keeping the thing true as the business changes. Could be a hire, could be an hour you block off yourself, could just be a conversation.

If you'd rather have an outside read than run these yourself, the free scanner's still up at shanegring.com/scan. Drop in a URL and you'll get a score and a short write-up on your site within about 48 hours. One read per site.

Either way, the honest check is the one at the top: where did your last ten clients actually come from? If every answer is a referral, your site's been grading itself on silence.

Take it with you

The three checks above, on a single page you can print and fill in with a pen. Room to write your answers down, plus a short note at the bottom on where to start depending on how they go.

Quiet Website Check.pdf

223.36 KB • PDF File

Download

Forward it to whoever actually manages your site if that isn't you. It reads fine without this email around it.

The Slingshot: No roof and no plan →