There is a particular frustration in being busier than you have ever been while people quietly assume you have shut down.
It happens because the signals a stranger uses to judge whether a business is still going are not the ones you would choose. Nobody checks your order book. They check the footer, the last post, whether the form works, and whether the link to your account on some platform goes anywhere. Those signals are cheap to read and they are wrong often enough to be unfair.
We should be upfront about our interest here. These eight are signals we use ourselves when checking whether a listed business is still trading. How we read these signals when we check sets out the procedure in full, and our method is the versioned document behind it. A business that fails several of them can fail a check while trading perfectly well, which is precisely why a check by us is never a judgement about the business, and why the procedure requires a human confirmation before anything is marked as gone.
What this is, and who it is for
This is for anyone running something real that looks, from outside, like it might have stopped. It is not a criticism. Every one of these is caused by ordinary busyness, and most of them are caused by having done the right thing once and never come back to it.
Each item below gets the signal, what a stranger concludes, the fix, and whether the fix is one-off or recurring. The recurring ones are the ones that matter, because a page that carries a date is a promise you have to keep.
Why this matters more than it sounds
No single item here proves anything. A stale copyright year proves that a template variable was hard-coded. A dead social link proves that you stopped enjoying a platform. Individually they are nothing.
The asymmetry is that they do not have to prove anything. A stranger is not conducting an investigation. They are deciding, in a few seconds, whether to bother. Three or four of these together shift the default assumption from "probably fine" to "probably gone", and once the assumption has shifted nothing else on the page gets read carefully.
That is why the fixes are worth an evening even though each one seems trivial.
1. The copyright year that stopped
The signal. The footer says a year that is not this one, sometimes several years off.
What a stranger concludes. Nobody has touched this site since then. Whatever else it says is that old too.
The fix. Either remove the year and leave the notice, which is perfectly normal, or update it. Do not install something that writes the current year automatically while the rest of the site sits still. That is a page pretending to be fresh, and a reader who works it out stops trusting the parts that are true.
One-off or recurring. One-off if you remove the year. Recurring, annually, if you keep it.
2. The social link to an account you abandoned
The signal. An icon in the header or footer leading to a profile whose last activity is years old, or to a page that no longer exists.
What a stranger concludes. Same as above, with an extra sting: you cared enough to link it, so its state is your current state.
The fix. Remove the link. That is the whole fix, and it takes a minute. If the account still matters to you but you post rarely, leave the profile up and remove the icon from the site so a stranger is not sent to judge you by it. If an account is genuinely dead, close it or update its bio to point at your site.
One-off or recurring. One-off per link. Worth a five-minute review whenever you drop a platform.
3. The blog or news page frozen mid-year
The signal. A news section whose most recent entry is from a year or more ago, usually with an enthusiastic first post and a thinning trail after it.
What a stranger concludes. Something stopped. People rarely assume the something was enthusiasm.
The fix. There are two honest options, and choosing badly between them is what causes the problem.
Keep it, if you will genuinely write two or three times a year. Two or three a year reads as a working business. Nothing for eighteen months does not.
Or remove it. Take the section out of the navigation, and either take the posts down or leave them where they are without a dated index in front of them. Removing a page is often better than maintaining it badly, and it is not a defeat. A site with no news section says nothing. A site with a news section that stopped says something specific.
One-off or recurring. Recurring if kept, and the commitment is real. One-off if removed.
4. The contact form nobody monitors
The signal. A form that submits successfully and goes nowhere useful. The notification address belongs to a former employee, or the mail lands in a filter, or the plugin broke in an update and nobody noticed because nobody notices silence.
What a stranger concludes. They do not conclude anything, which is the trouble. They send a message, hear nothing, and decide you are not trading or not interested.
The fix. Test it from outside, today. Use an address you own that is not connected to the site, on a phone, and send a real message. Check where it arrives. Check the spam folder. Then put a name and a rough response window next to the form, and add a second route that does not depend on the same plumbing.
One-off or recurring. Recurring. Put a test in the diary quarterly and after any change to the site, the theme or the mail provider.
5. The "coming soon" page that never came
The signal. A section, a product page or a whole subdomain saying something is on its way, with no date, unchanged for a long time.
What a stranger concludes. The plan was abandoned, and if that was abandoned, what else was.
The fix. Delete it. If the thing is still coming, say what and roughly when, with a date on the sentence so it is a statement rather than a mood. If the date passes and the thing has not arrived, replace the page rather than leaving it. An empty category or a placeholder with nothing behind it is worse than an absence.
One-off or recurring. One-off, unless you keep making promises with dates on them, in which case recurring by definition.
6. The expired certificate or broken image
The signal. A browser warning before the page loads. Or the page loads with broken image placeholders, a missing logo, a font that failed, a map embed that shows an error.
What a stranger concludes. For the certificate warning, most people simply leave, and many will not be able to tell your site apart from something malicious. For broken images, the assumption is neglect.
The fix. Certificates should renew automatically with almost any modern host. Confirm that yours does, and make sure the expiry warnings go to an address you read rather than one you set up when the site was built. For broken images, load the site in a private window and walk every page, or ask your host or developer to run a link check. Broken images are usually caused by a file that was moved, a plugin that was removed, or a third-party embed that changed.
One-off or recurring. Recurring. Cheap to check, easy to miss, and it breaks without you doing anything.
7. Announcements about events that have passed
The signal. A banner about a market you attended last summer. A holiday-hours notice from two Christmases ago. A "we're at the fair this weekend" that has been up since a weekend long finished.
What a stranger concludes. This is the strongest of the eight, because it is unambiguous. A dated statement about the past, presented as current, is direct evidence that nobody has looked at the page.
The fix. Whenever you put up a time-limited announcement, decide at that moment what happens to it afterwards, and write the removal date in the same place you wrote the announcement. If your site can schedule an unpublish, use it. If it cannot, a calendar reminder for the day after works fine.
One-off or recurring. Recurring, and this is the clearest case of a dated page being a commitment. The banner is a promise to come back and take it down.
8. Stock that has been "out of stock" for a year
The signal. A shop where most or all items show as unavailable, or where the same items have been unavailable indefinitely. The physical equivalent is a booking calendar with no availability in any month and no explanation.
What a stranger concludes. The shop has closed. This is a reasonable conclusion and it is frequently wrong, because the real story is usually that a maker stopped restocking that particular line and never removed it.
The fix. Hide or archive lines you are not making again. For things that genuinely come back, say when, or offer a way to be told. For a booking calendar with nothing in it, put a sentence next to it saying what is happening: fully booked until spring, closed for the season, taking enquiries anyway. A stated reason with a date converts an alarming blank into an ordinary one.
One-off or recurring. Recurring, in step with however you actually make or stock things.
The ten-minute maintenance pass
Put this in the diary at whatever interval you will actually honour. Quarterly is realistic for most people. Rushing it is fine; the point is that somebody looks.
- Open the site in a private window on a phone.
- Read the footer. Year correct or removed.
- Tap every social icon. Remove any that lands somewhere stale or broken.
- Look at the most recent dated thing on the site. Decide whether it still reads as current, and if not, deal with the section rather than the item.
- Send yourself a message through the form from an outside address. Confirm arrival.
- Walk the main pages looking for broken images and failed embeds.
- Remove any announcement about something that has happened.
- Check availability displays, stock, calendars, opening hours, against reality.
- Fix the contradictions you noticed on the way past.
The recurring items are 3 through 8. The one-off items you fix once and stop thinking about. That difference is worth being deliberate about, because most of the ongoing burden here is self-inflicted: every dated page you add is a small standing obligation, and it is entirely reasonable to decide you do not want another one.
In Plain English
None of these mean you have stopped trading. Together they change what a stranger assumes, and the assumption is hard to recover from because nobody tells you they made it.
Fix the ones you fix once: the copyright year, the dead links, the "coming soon" page. Then decide honestly about the recurring ones, and remove anything you will not keep up rather than letting it sit there stating an old date. A news page you have abandoned says more about you than no news page at all.
Test your contact form from outside today. That is the one on this list that costs you actual work rather than the appearance of it.
Questions about liveness signals
If I fail some of these, would you mark my business as gone?
Not on these alone. Our procedure requires two failed checks and then a human confirmation before anything becomes a tombstone, and a tombstone is never an accusation or a statement about how a business is run. What happens when we decide something has closed sets out the process and the route back if we got it wrong, and the tombstone index is public.
Should I add a "last updated" line to every page?
Only where the content is the kind that goes stale, such as hours, availability, prices or stock. A date on a page you will never revisit is another commitment you did not need to make.
Is it really better to delete a page than to leave it?
Often, yes. The test is whether the page states something time-bound. A page about how you make something can sit unchanged for years without misleading anyone. A page announcing a date cannot.
Run the findability checklist for the full stranger's-eye pass, or take the free ungated version from templates. The structural companion is shopfront basics.