The SiteRoot team6 min read
Somebody tells you a website needs updating regularly, so you feel vaguely guilty about it for two years and do nothing, and then one day a customer mentions that the price on your site is not the price you quoted them.
The answer is that you update on events, not on a schedule. The moment a fact about your business changes, you change it that day. On top of that, one twenty minute check every three months catches the things that changed without anyone announcing them. That is the whole obligation. Everything past it is optional and should be treated as optional.
The reason to be strict about the first part is that a wrong fact is not a neutral gap. It is a small, specific lie your business is telling a stranger at nine o'clock at night, and they have no way to know it is out of date.
The changes that cannot wait a day
If any of these change, the website changes the same day.
- Your phone number, or the mobile the calls actually go to.
- Your email address.
- Your prices, including a call-out fee or a minimum charge.
- Your opening hours, and that includes the week around Easter, Christmas and the public holidays your state has and others do not.
- A service you have stopped offering. Getting enquiries for work you no longer do wastes their time and yours, every single week.
- A service you have started offering, which is the one people forget, and it is the one that would have earned money.
- Staff who have left, especially if a customer would ask for them by name.
- Your licence number, your insurance, your accreditations.
- Your address, if you have a shopfront or a yard.
- The suburbs or region you cover, after you drop one or take on another.
None of those is a marketing decision. They are facts, and a website exists first to state facts correctly.
The twenty minute check, every three months
Put it in the calendar four times a year. It goes faster than you expect, and it always finds something.
- Open the site on your phone, on mobile data, and count to five. Is it up and readable?
- Tap your phone number. Does it start a call?
- Fill in your own enquiry form and confirm the email arrives, in the inbox, not in spam.
- Check the padlock in the address bar. No padlock means some visitors are getting a browser warning instead of your site.
- Check the year in the footer, and any claim like "serving Brisbane since 2019" that quietly needs its number bumped.
- Read the prices and hours. Still true?
- Look at the photos. Is that work you would still show a customer? Is that still your van?
- Search your own business name and see what comes back, including the map listing, and whether the details there match the site.
Anything that fails, fix it before you close the laptop. A list of things to fix later is a list.
Once a year, ask the bigger question
Businesses drift, and the website is usually the last thing to notice.
The service that was a sideline is now most of your revenue. You stopped doing residential. You took on a second van and can cover twice the area. The name of the thing your customers call you about has changed.
Once a year, read your own home page as though you had never met yourself, and ask whether it describes the business you have now or the one you had when it was written. That is a half hour with a coffee, not a project.
Do you need to publish new content all the time
The honest answer for most local businesses is no.
We run a blog, so we are not going to pretend writing is pointless. But it only earns anything if you actually keep doing it, and a blog with four posts from one enthusiastic fortnight two years ago is worse than no blog, because every visitor can see the date. The same goes for a News page whose last item is from 2022. It makes a healthy business look dormant.
If you do want to write, the rule that works is narrow: write the questions you answer on the phone every week. What does a call-out cost. Do you work in my suburb. How long does that take. Do I need a permit. You already know the answers cold, they take twenty minutes each, and they are what people are genuinely searching for. Three of those beat thirty pieces about industry trends.
And if you will not write, do not feel bad. Put the effort into the services pages and the photos instead. A finished, accurate five page site is worth more than a stale twelve page one.
The failure mode this is all about
Owners describe the same ending often enough that it deserves naming.
The site was fine in year one. In year two the prices drifted and nobody changed them. By year three the hours were wrong, a service that had been dropped was still listed, and the site had stopped being an asset and become a source of awkward conversations.
Nobody decided that. It happened because making a change required emailing someone, waiting, and being charged for an hour. So the first small change never got made, and after that the site was something you avoided thinking about.
What updating should cost you
This is the practical heart of it. Whatever you build your site with, get a straight answer to two questions before you commit:
- What does it cost me to change one sentence next March?
- How long does it take from me asking to it being live?
If the answers are "an hourly rate with a minimum" and "a few days", you will not make small changes, and your site will go stale exactly as described above. That is not a character flaw. It is a predictable response to friction.
If the answers are "nothing" and "a few minutes", you will fix the price the day it changes, and the site stays true.
Where SiteRoot comes into it
Changes are included, so editing a price or swapping a photo does not start a billable conversation. You ask for the change in plain language, the way you would say it out loud, and you see it in a preview before anything goes live.
A few things update themselves. The file that tells search engines which pages your site has is refreshed every time you publish, so adding or removing a page does not leave a stale list behind. There is also an llms.txt file, which is a plain summary of your business that AI assistants can read directly rather than guess at, and it is written from your site as it is now.
We also watch two things on your behalf between your quarterly checks: whether the site is up, and whether its certificate is about to expire. Those are the two failures that happen silently and that you would otherwise find out about from a customer.
The rest is the twenty minutes, four times a year. Put the first one in the calendar now.
