Is Your Website Stuck in 2019?
Outdated Stats and Broken Links

You know that moment in a movie when the hero walks into a house, sees the calendar still flipped to a date three years ago, and the cake on the table is covered in cobwebs? Nobody has to say a word. You just know something is off.

Your website can give people that same feeling.

It doesn’t take much. A page that says “over 10 years in business” when it’s really been 16. A statistic that ends with “according to a 2018 study.” A “Learn More” button that leads to a “Page Not Found.” One by one they’re small things, but added together, they tell visitors that nobody’s been minding the store.

Why Does This Matter?

It chips away at trust. Think about how things have changed in the last two years, let alone ten or fifteen. Do you want someone with references to setting up rotary phones setting up your WiFi? Nope.

Google is BIG on the trust factor, especially with the rise in inaccurate, spammy content. Its guide to helpful content asks whether a page has “any easily-verified factual errors” and says that of all the qualities it looks for, “trust is most important.”

It sends customers to dead ends. A broken link is a closed door. If someone clicks “Schedule Now” or “See Our Work” and lands on an error page, most people won’t bother looking for another way in. Ain’t nobody got time for that — and the next business on the list gets the call instead.

It happens to everyone, even the big guys. In 2024, Pew Research Center found that 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 had vanished ten years later. They also found that 23% of news pages and 21% of government pages had at least one broken link. Links rot. Pages get moved, companies rebrand, and the article you linked to five years ago is long gone with the wind.

Will it tank your Google ranking? Meeeeeahhhhhhhhhhhh, well…..not directly. Google says a page that returns a “404 Not Found” error doesn’t hurt your site’s ranking … on …its… own. But the real damage is to the people visiting your site, and to all the effort you put into getting them there in the first place.

How to Find And Fix Outdated Stats and Broken Links

You can easily do a quick sweep of your own website, as long as you don’t have ten thousand product pages. Look for things like:

• Places that specifically refer to a year. So things like, “for over 14 years,” definitely need to be updated. I try to use phrases like “since 2010” instead so that you don’t have to update them constantly.
• If you know you referenced specific articles or sources for things, take a minute to go to those pages and click the links. If they still open to the original destination? Great. If they don’t, or you get an error, or dancing pandas, make a note that it needs to be revised.
• If someone tells you they found a broken link, ask them specifically where they found it. Knowing that it’s somewhere on the “contact” page makes it much easier to find than if they say it was somewhere on some page.
• Look at your footer – the part at the very bottom of your website that you see on every page? What does the copyright year say? Are there associations or partner logos on there that you’re no longer working with? Old email addresses for people who never came back after COVID? These definitely need to be updated.

These are just a couple of areas that you can spot check on your own website while you’re sipping your latte. These ones are “hiding in plain sight” so to speak, but a deeper dive is definitely needed to be more thorough. 

Trust me, you don’t want old Miley Cyrus popping up. Ever.

Confused Yet?

If this all sounds like a lot, or you’d rather spend your time running your business than chasing broken links, that’s what we’re here for. We do this for our clients every month, and we’ll explain what we find in a way that makes sense.

Get in touch and let’s make sure your website is up to 2026 standards, and not partying like it’s 1999.