A dead Google+ link, a Twitter box that no longer loads and an old copyright year each look minor. Together they suggest the business may have closed, so remove them and keep only what you maintain.

The site

A roofing company serving a cluster of suburbs. The home page opens with a good photograph of a crew on a steep roof, a phone number in the header, and three plainly named services: re-roofing, repairs and gutters.

Beside the phone number sits a row of icons: Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The same row appears again in the footer of every page.

The blog has a sidebar box headed Latest Tweets. The footer ends with Copyright 2016.

The business itself is busy. Its crews are out every day and its Google listing carries recent reviews. Nobody has opened the website's settings since the year in the footer.

What the site gets right

Most of it, which is what makes the rest worth fixing.

The services are named in plain words. The phone number dials when tapped. The photographs show the company's own crews rather than stock.

A visitor arriving from search can tell within seconds what the business does and where. The trouble is what they find when they look a little closer.

The inference a visitor makes

Somebody choosing a roofer is about to spend a large sum on work they cannot inspect themselves. Before calling, they look for reassurance.

The fifth is where this site fails, and the failure undermines the third.

A roof comes with a workmanship warranty measured in years. A site that looks abandoned makes a homeowner wonder who would answer a call about a leak five years from now.

The icon that opens a closure notice

The consumer version of Google+ closed on April 2. Tap the icon on this site now and it opens a notice from Google saying the service is no longer available.

That tells the visitor two things: nobody at the business has looked at its own site since before April, and a page the business once sent customers to has gone.

Not every visitor followed the closure news. What they see is a link from the business to a page that no longer exists, which is what a closed business leaves behind.

And because the icon sits in the header and the footer, it is on every page.

The box where the tweets used to be

The Latest Tweets box shows a spinning wheel, then nothing. The plugin that filled it has not been updated in years, and the way it fetched tweets stopped working.

Even when boxes like this work, they display the date of the newest tweet. This account last posted in 2016, so a working feed would only say the same thing more precisely.

A box headed Latest with nothing in it is a promise of news that has not been kept, and a plugin still trying to fetch a feed can slow every page it sits on.

The year at the bottom

Copyright 2016 sits on the last line of every page, directly beneath the phone number and the address.

That placement matters. The footer is where visitors look for contact details, so the date is read at the exact moment somebody is deciding whether to call.

The year was typed in when the site was built. Nothing updates it; somebody has to remember, and nobody has had a reason to touch the site since.

On its own, an old year is a small thing. Beside a dead icon and an empty feed, it reads like the date the lights went off.

Why three small things add up

No visitor deducts points one detail at a time. They form an impression quickly, and three signals pointing the same way become a conclusion.

Here the conclusion is that the business may have closed, or stopped caring, and either is a reason to call the next roofer on the list.

The signals also feed each other. A visitor who has just found a dead icon reads the footer year with suspicion, and one who noticed the year first taps the icons to check.

The cost is invisible. A visitor who leaves does not phone to say why, and the real strengths of the site, the photographs and the plain services, never get the chance to count.

A worked example

The problem came to light when the company changed its office phone number, and somebody had to edit the site for the first time in three years.

While there, they tapped every icon. Google+ opened the closure notice, and Twitter opened an account whose last post was from 2016.

The Google+ icon was removed from the header and footer and replaced with a link to the company's Google listing, a separate product unaffected by the closure, where the reviews are.

The Twitter icon and the feed box went, along with the plugin behind them. The footer year was set to update itself.

The SEO plugin's list of social profiles, which tells search engines which accounts are the company's own, still named both old accounts. They were removed there too.

Then the company added what had been missing: a short Recent jobs section on the home page, three photographs labelled with the month and the suburb, refreshed by the office every few weeks.

The counter-case within the site

Not every old detail costs a call.

A footer with no year at all is fine, and a site with no social icons loses nothing; the icons were never why anybody phoned a roofer.

Icons for accounts the business actually uses are the opposite case. A Facebook page showing this week's job is a sign of life, and worth linking.

And a customer referred by a neighbour arrives already trusting the business, and forgives a lot. Visitors from search do not.

Remove what leads nowhere, keep only what somebody maintains, and let the site show something from this year.

What to change

  1. Tap every icon on a phone.
  2. Remove the Google+ icon from every template.
  3. Link to your Google listing instead, if anything.
  4. Delete dead feed boxes and their plugins.
  5. Set the footer year to update itself.
  6. Show one dated thing from this year.
  7. Check the social profile list in your SEO plugin.

Step six is the one that changes the inference. Removing dead details stops the site looking abandoned; one recent, dated thing, such as last month's job, shows that somebody is there.

The places those links hide away from the website are covered in the Google+ links left behind.

Frequently asked questions

Why does an old Google+ icon matter?

Google+ closed on April 2, so the icon now opens a closure notice. Visitors read a link to something gone as a sign the business may have gone too.

What should replace the Google+ icon?

Nothing, or a link to your Google listing, which is a separate product, was not affected by the closure, and is where your reviews appear.

Is a broken Twitter feed worth fixing?

Usually it is worth removing. Even a working feed shows the date of the last tweet, and an account last used in 2016 advertises that silence.

Does the copyright year really matter?

Alone, very little. But it sits beside the phone number in the footer, so it is read just as somebody decides whether to call.

Why do small details add up?

Visitors form one quick impression rather than scoring details separately. Three signals pointing toward a closed or careless business become a reason to call someone else.

Should I remove all social icons?

Only those for accounts nobody maintains. An active page showing recent work is a sign of life and worth linking; a dormant one is evidence against you.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

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