The Haunting of Your Homepage
Here’s something spooky: your website might be haunted, and you’d be the last to know.
That’s not because you aren’t paying attention. It’s because you never visit your site the way a stranger does.
You know where everything is. You know the phone number by heart. You know the contact form “works” because it worked when it launched three years ago. So you click straight past the creaky floorboards and flickering lights that a first-time visitor walks right into.
And visitors don’t stick around to investigate. They don’t call to let you know something’s off. They just quietly back out of the house and go knock on your competitor’s door instead.
So this Halloween, let’s be like the Ghostbusters on a job: grab the gear, walk the halls, and figure out exactly what’s lurking in there. Good news, most website hauntings come from the same four ghosts. Once you know what they look like, they’re a lot less scary.
Your Field Guide to Website Ghosts (with imaginary David Attenborough voice)
Ghost #1: 📺👻 The Poltergeist (broken links and missing images)
The Poltergeist is the noisy one. It knocks things off shelves: a button that leads to a “Page Not Found” error, a gallery full of little broken-image icons, a link to a partner site that shut down in 2021.
Each one is small on its own. Together, they tell visitors nobody’s been home for a while. Google notices too. Search engines treat a site full of dead ends as less trustworthy, which can slowly push you down the results.
Ghost #2: 🌀 The Void (contact forms that go nowhere)
This is the scariest ghost on the list, because it’s completely silent. A customer fills out your contact form, clicks Submit, sees “Thank you!” and waits for your reply. You never get the message. They never hear back. They assume you don’t care, and you never even knew they existed.
Forms break more often than you’d think. An email address changes, a spam filter gets overzealous, or an update quietly breaks the connection between the form and your inbox. Everything looks fine on the outside, while the messages fall into the Upside Down.
Ghost #3: 🧟 The Zombie Pages (content that should have stayed buried)
Zombie Pages shamble around long after they should have been put to rest. Think of the “Spring Open House 2023” event page, the promo that expired two summers ago, or the staff bio for someone who moved to Arizona.
Visitors who land on these start to wonder what else on your site is out of date. And if your old promo is still offering 20% off, guess who’s going to ask you to honor it? Ahem. Karen.
Ghost #4: 🕸️ The Phantom Info (wrong hours, numbers and prices)
Phantom Info is the ghost of your business as it used to be. Old hours. A phone number you retired. Prices from before everything got more expensive. It’s especially sneaky because it often hides in more than one place: your footer, your contact page, your Google Business Profile and your Facebook page might all tell a different story.
Nothing earns a one-star review faster than a customer who drove across town because your website said you were open, and you were locked up tight.
Your 15-Minute Ghost Sweep
You don’t need a proton pack for this part. Pour a coffee, open your website on your phone (that’s how most of your customers see it), and pretend you’ve never been there before. Jot down anything that feels weird or like it’s holding up your journey as you go.
- Click every button and menu link. Does each one land somewhere real, or do you hit an error page?
- Scroll for broken images. Look for empty boxes, broken-image icons or photos that load sideways or look all Gumby-ish.
- Send yourself a test message. Fill out your contact form with a note like “Ghost test, please ignore” and confirm it actually lands in your inbox. If it doesn’t show up within an hour, that’s your Void.
- Read every date. Events, promos, “new for 2024” banners. If it’s in the past, it’s a Zombie.
- Check the people. Is everyone in your staff bios still working here? Bueller? Bueller?
- Compare your hours and phone number. Check your website, Google Business Profile and Facebook page side by side. Do all three match?
- Spot-check prices. Anything listed on the site should match what you’d actually charge today.
This is a look, don’t touch inspection. Your job is to find the ghosts, not to wrestle them yourself. Poking around in your site’s settings or plugins to fix a broken link can accidentally knock something else loose, and then you’ve got two ghosts instead of one. Make your list and hand it off to your web developer… or better yet… me!
When to Call in the Team with the Proton Packs
Found a ghost or two? Totally normal. Every website collects a few over time, the same way every attic collects a few cobwebs. What matters is getting them cleared out before your customers find them first.
It’s time to call in the team that’s “too hot to handle, too cold to hold” (sorry, now the theme song is stuck in my head) if:
- Your contact form test never arrived
- You found more than a handful of broken links or images
- Your hours, phone number or prices don’t match across your website, Google and Facebook
- You can’t remember the last time anyone looked under the hood of your site
That’s exactly what our team does. We’ll walk the halls of your website, trap every ghost we find, and set things up so they don’t sneak back in. Just don’t ask us to cross the streams.
Think your site might be haunted? Schedule a website check-up and let Full Armor Marketing clear it out before the holiday rush brings in your busiest season of visitors.