A Blog That Stopped in 2019

The site

An insurance brokerage with a well-maintained site: current team, current products, and a page updated this year with a regulatory notice.

The navigation includes Blog, which contains eleven posts.

The first is from March 2018 and the last is from August 2019.

The most recent post is titled with a year in it, so the date is visible without looking at any timestamp.

The inference a visitor makes

• This section is dead.
• The rest might be too.
• Is this information current.
• They started and stopped.
• What else did they stop.

The fourth is the specific damage and it is worse than a wholly neglected site. A site nobody has touched reads as a business that does not use its website. A site that is current everywhere except one abandoned room reads as a business that begins things and abandons them.

Why one dead section is worse

Which is counterintuitive and worth sitting with.

A visitor to a uniformly old site adjusts their expectations and reads what is there.

A visitor to a current site with one dead section has been given evidence that the business maintains its site, and then evidence that it gave up on this.

The contrast is the signal, and it is doing the work.

For a professional services business, where the whole proposition is diligence and follow-through, that signal is expensive.

Nobody articulates it and it is present in the impression.

The three options

And they are the only three.

Remove it, which takes an hour and is the right answer most of the time.

Restart it, which requires a commitment you have already failed once.

Or keep the useful posts and remove the section, which is the middle answer nobody considers.

That third option means moving two or three genuinely useful posts into the main site as ordinary pages, undated, and deleting the rest along with the blog itself.

An explanation of how a claim works does not need to be a blog post at all; it can simply be a page.

Doing that keeps the value and removes the abandonment at the same time.

It is the only option with no downside attached.

A worked example

The brokerage read the eleven posts.

Two were genuinely useful explanations that people still arrived at from search.

Six were company news from four years ago with no continuing value.

Three were seasonal reminders that would be fine if undated.

They moved the two explanations and the three reminders into the resources section as undated pages, redirected the old addresses to them, and removed the blog entirely.

Search traffic held, the navigation got shorter, and the abandoned section stopped existing.

Redirect rather than delete

Which is the technical detail that preserves what value exists.

Old posts may have links pointing at them, and some may still bring visitors from search.

Check which of the eleven receive any traffic before deciding anything, which takes five minutes.

Then redirect each removed address to the page that replaced it, or to the most relevant section.

Do not redirect everything to the home page, which is worse than a proper error page and confuses anybody who followed a link.

Five redirects is a ten-minute job and preserves whatever the posts had accumulated.

If you restart it, decide the cadence honestly

Which is the harder of the two live options.

The blog stopped because writing weekly was more work than the business had capacity for, which is the usual reason.

Restarting at the same cadence produces the same outcome in six months.

Four posts a year, published on dates you have chosen in advance, is a commitment that survives a busy quarter.

Better still, write them all in one sitting and schedule them, which removes the monthly decision entirely.

A blog with four posts a year and no gaps reads better than one with twenty posts and a two-year hole.

Undate what does not need a date

Which is the broader lesson for the rest of the site.

An explanation of how something works, a guide to a decision, or an answer to a common question is not news and does not need a publication date.

Those belong in a resources or guides section, presented as pages, where nobody is counting how long ago they appeared.

Reserve dates for things where the date matters: a regulatory change, an announcement, an event.

That distinction alone prevents most of the staleness problem from recurring.

Take it out of the navigation either way

Which is the change worth making before any decision about the content.

A Blog item in a top-level menu is an invitation, and an invitation into an empty room is the whole of the problem being described here.

Removing that link costs nothing, takes two minutes, and immediately stops most visitors from encountering the abandoned section at all.

The posts remain reachable by their addresses, so nothing that was bringing traffic is lost while you decide what to do properly.

Do that today and take the hour for the rest of it whenever there is an hour.

The counter-case within the site

The rest of the site is well kept.

The team page is current, the product pages are accurate, and somebody clearly reviews the regulatory content.

That is a business that maintains its site, which is why the contrast is so visible.

And some old posts genuinely still perform, in which case removing the section and keeping those pages is exactly right.

A blog that stopped and still brings meaningful traffic is an asset with a presentation problem rather than a dead section.

Treat it accordingly: keep the pages, lose the dates, and stop calling the section a blog.

The content was never really the problem here and the framing always was.

What to change

1. Check traffic to each post.
2. Keep the ones that still perform.
3. Move them as undated pages.
4. Redirect the old addresses.
5. Remove the section.
6. Take Blog out of the navigation.
7. Undate anything that is not news.

Step one prevents the expensive version of this, since deleting a section without checking occasionally removes the two pages that were bringing people to the site.

The whole-site version is covered in a site last updated in 2017.

Frequently asked questions

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