When organisations suddenly start questioning their website
Most organisations don’t think their website is a problem.
For a long time, the website has just existed. They may agree it’s untidy, they may admit some pages are out of date. They may notice the occasional broken link. But fundamentally, they would say it’s working.
Then something happens and it makes people look more closely.
Maybe enquiries drop, a campaign fails to deliver results, internal teams begin to avoid updating the website because it’s too hard, or the organisation has evolved and the website hasn’t been able to keep up.
These moments often raise uncomfortable possibilities that the website itself may be part of the problem.
In this article, I explore some of these triggering situations and what organisations usually consider doing next.
When organisations start to question their website
Organisations rarely decide to rethink their website out of the blue. There is usually a trigger. Something that exposes a gap between what the organisation needs from its website and what the website is actually doing.
From experience, common triggers include:
A senior staff member asks an awkward question
“Why is this on our website?” “Why did this campaign not work?” “Why aren’t we getting enough enquiries?” And no one can answer it. Suddenly, you realise the website reflects the past instead of the present and how little control there is.
A migration or redesign
There’s a decision to redesign the site, or the content management system’s support is coming to an end, and the site needs to be migrated. Suddenly, people realise there are thousands of pages that no one has looked at in years. They include projects that ended years ago and entire sections that no longer reflect how the organisation works. And no one knows who owns them. What do you do?
A new audience or service on offer
Suddenly, the website needs to include new services, new priorities or a new audience and no one can decide where or how to add it.
Internal teams struggle to update the website
The communications manager might decide to add or reorganise a few pages. But it’s complicated, the content overlaps, the ownership is unclear, or dependent on too many people. They go down a rabbit hole.
Websites rarely become complicated overnight. The change is slow. A new page here, another request there. A section added for a project, another for a campaign. Over time, the structure gets muddled and harder to see.
By the time the organisation realises something isn’t quite right, they’ve already been working around the problem for years. They added new pages instead of fixing old ones. They patched up sections to mask the cracks.
The question isn’t whether your website has problems; most large organisational websites do.
The real question is, “How long can you continue working around them before you decide to fix them?”
What happens next?
Once the organisation recognises the problem, the next question is usually practical.
Who is going to fix it?
A sensible place to start is by conducting an internal review.
The people inside the organisation understand its work, priorities and audience better than anyone. An internal review can quickly highlight where content is outdated, duplicated or no longer relevant.
If you’re reviewing your site internally, I recommend you focus on these key questions:
What is the website actually for?
Who are the most important audiences?
What are the key tasks people need to complete?
Which content genuinely supports those tasks?
Ask several colleagues. If you get different answers, that’s a really useful signal that the site may be trying to do too many things at once.
When an external perspective can help?
For smaller organisations, an internal review is often enough to bring the website back under control.
But in larger organisations, the challenge is often less about individual pages and more about structure.
At that point, bringing in someone external may help.
Not because internal teams lack expertise, we’ve already said above that people inside the organisation understand the work best. But because an outside perspective is removed from any organisational history and will approach the website in a different way.
An external review can often offer:
Objectivity - Someone who isn’t connected to the history of the site can look at it from the outside and ask basic questions that internal teams have stop noticing.
Pattern recognition - Someone who has worked across many organisations will have seen the same website problems before and can recognise them quickly.
Proven methods - External reviewers often bring established ways of analysing websites: content audits, user journeys, audience tasks and information architecture. These frameworks help them structure messy site into something understandable for your audiences.
Independence - An external voice can ask difficult questions about content or structure without upsetting internal hierarchies or departmental politics.
Momentum - When the website work sits alongside everyone’s normal job, it tends to get pushed aside. Having someone there to drive the project forward helps keep things moving and ensures the work doesn’t stall.
What matters most
Often, the most effective approach is a combination of both: internal teams bringing their deep knowledge of the organisation, alongside an external perspective that helps step back and redesign the structure of the site objectively.
What matters most is not ignoring the moment when you realise the website is no longer working for your users (both internal and external users) and starting the conversation about how to fix it.
Because once you see the problem clearly, the hardest part is already done.
If you'd like an objective, professional, outside perspective
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