You know the site. It’s been around for years, the design isn’t terrible, but somehow it always feels behind. The staff page shows people who left in 2021. The blog’s last post is from last quarter. The upcoming events section is still advertising something from six months ago.
And every time you ask about it, you hear the same thing: “Yeah, we keep meaning to update that.”
Here’s what I’ve learned from sitting across the table from dozens of organizations wrestling with this: it’s rarely a content problem. They’re not sitting around not writing. The real culprit is hidden in their workflow — and once you spot it, you can’t unsee it.
The One-Person Bottleneck
The pattern I see most often goes like this. One person owns the website. Maybe it’s a marketing manager, maybe it’s the founder’s cousin who took a web design class. This person also owns everything else, because of course they do. When something needs updating, it goes to them. When it needs approving, it goes through their manager. When it needs publishing, it goes back to the first person. Nobody’s slacking off. Everyone’s just drowning.
I worked with a community health organization that had locked their WordPress site so tightly that regular staff literally couldn’t make updates. When new programs launched, there was no web presence because getting a page published took weeks of approvals and back-and-forth emails. They’d started directing people to a different website instead — their own site had become unusable. The content wasn’t missing. The access was.
A therapy practice I know had accumulated years of blog posts from practitioners who’d left the team, all filed by publication date with no real structure. The content was there. It was just buried under a taxonomy that made sense in 2019 and made nobody happy by 2024. Patients with specific concerns couldn’t find relevant articles. The site looked neglected even though the underlying library was solid.
The Approval Quicksand
Then there’s the version where the process isn’t locked down — it’s just byzantine. I’ve watched landing pages get rebuilt as structural components because the approval process for updating copy was so complicated that by the time anything went live, the information was already stale. You can’t hold a webpage hostage to quarterly approval cycles and expect it to feel current. It doesn’t work.
Every day that an outdated page stays live is a day someone’s forming an impression based on yesterday’s reality. That’s not a content problem. That’s a workflow problem.
What This Actually Costs You
It doesn’t stop at looking sloppy. When your website can’t keep pace with your actual operations, you’re leaving pieces of your business invisible. Programs exist that nobody knows about. Events go live with placeholder copy. Staff changes take weeks to show up. You’re essentially saying your website is for archives, not for the people you’re trying to reach right now.
The fix isn’t writing more. It’s building a workflow where good people can make updates without committees and gatekeepers turning every small change into a project. It’s organizing content so people can actually find what they need. It’s making your website responsive to reality instead of a relic of it.
This is exactly what our UX Helpdesk members work on with us month over month — the operational fixes that keep your website from falling behind reality. Learn more about UX Helpdesk →
