Why Your Website Always Takes the Back Seat (And What It's Actually Costing You)

Real question: How long has your website been on your to-do list? Months? A year? Longer? You know it needs work, and you have the best intentions, but somehow it keeps getting pushed to next week, next month, always landing at the bottom of your priority list. And here's the thing—it's not just you. Even really successful business owners who are excellent at execution let their websites languish for way longer than they should. But why does this particular task keep getting pushed aside when you know how important it is?

In this episode, I'm breaking down the three real reasons your website stays on the back burner. More importantly, I'm talking about what deprioritizing your website is actually costing you—from credibility and pricing perception to sales conversions and mental energy. 

And friend—this isn't about guilt or shame. It's about understanding the psychology and practical barriers so you can finally address them.

_____________________________________________
 
 EPISODE 170.
Read the show notes and view the full transcript here: 

______________________________________________

Here's the info on your host, Erin Ollila
Erin Ollila believes in the power of words and how a message can inform – and even transform – its intended audience. She graduated from Fairfield University with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and went on to co-found Spry, an award-winning online literary journal.

When Erin’s not helping her clients understand their website data or improve their website copy, you can catch her hosting the Talk Copy to Me podcast and guesting on shows such as Profit is a Choice, Mindful Marketing, The Power in Purpose, and Business-First Creatives.

Stay in touch with Erin Ollila, SEO website copywriter:
• Learn more about my VIP intensive options or just book a strategy session to get started right away
• Visit Erin's website to learn more about her business, services, and products

_____________________________________________

I hope you'll join me in Rewrite Your Site, an 8-week website copywriting program for small business owners, service providers, and creatives.

The program kicks off on 1/6/26 and goes through to the end of February, but if you join before 11/27/25, you get access to three huge bonuses AND you can join our pre-gaming party in December.

See all details and join us here: https://erinollila.com/rewrite-your-site/

Transcript

0:00

Okay. Real question. How long has your website been on your to-do list? Months, a year, longer. You know it needs work, and I know you have the best intentions, but you are telling yourself, okay, next quarter I'm gonna work on this, or as soon as this launch is over, I'm gonna prioritize my website. But it never actually happens. It just keeps getting pushed to next week, next month, and somehow it's always landing at the bottom of your priority list. And good news though. It's not just you. Sorry for calling you out too. By the way. This is a very universal problem for small businesses. Even really successful business owners who are excellent at execution let their websites sit there languishing away for way longer than they should. Why? Why does this particular task keep getting pushed aside when you know how important it is? That's what we're gonna talk about today. The real reason that your website stays on the back burner, and I'm gonna be honest with you, I'm gonna talk about what that's actually costing you. I know I started with a question, but I'm gonna give you another right now. What are you actually telling yourself about why your website isn't getting done? Quite often I hear things like, I'm too busy, or, you know, I'm bad at prioritizing. I keep procrastinating. I need to do some research. I'm not sure if I want to hire help or do it on my own. Heck, maybe you even think it's a kind of a character flaw or a business, uh, failing because you just can't get this one task done. But. It's not a character floor. There are very specific psychological and practical reasons why websites get deprioritized, and once you understand what those reasons are, you can start to address them instead of just beating yourself up about it because I bet you are, I bet you are absolutely beating yourself up about the fact that you have not updated your website against your best wishes. You can stop that. So let's start with the first reason that your website is always constantly getting pushed to the back burner, and that is urgency. Here's the reality of how most of us actually prioritize our work, especially marketing. We're not prioritizing based on what's most important. We prioritize based on what is most urgent, what is screaming at us right now, what feels like it can't wait another day, and the urgent will always win over the important. Let me give you an example. If you are in the middle of a launch and your sales page crashes. You're gonna fix that immediately, right? Like drop everything. Don't go on a date with your partner and fix that webpage, even if you have to design it yourself and rewrite every word of that copy. Why? Because it is. Actively costing you money right this very moment. You can see the direct immediate impact of that page going down, and every minute that it's not there, you lose revenue. The urgency there is built right in, so you make it happen. But your website isn't on fire. It is not broken. Or at least, obviously, it's not broken in a way that creates a real crisis. It's just quietly underperforming. It's not dramatically failing and you can't see the clients that you're not getting. There's no alarm bell happening, no crash notification, no urgent emails. So it feels like something you can deal with later. But here is what actually is happening. Every single day that your website is underperforming, you are potentially losing clients and leads because if people can't figure out, you know who you are, what you do, what you offer, who you serve in those first few seconds of finding your page and they leave, that's a potential client gone. Or if someone receives a glowing recommendation about you, but finds their way over to your website and can't actually find that service that was referred to them by a peer. They're not gonna bother connecting. There's so many reasons why these things happen behind the scenes, and you don't know that they're actually happening. There's no sign or notification that pops up that says, oh, you just lost a client. Nope, this is just going on while you run your everyday business. And you are accepting that, and you're just accepting the idea that it should be working well enough for you. This is a trap we all fall into. We all wait for the crisis before we act, but with websites, the crisis could be, look at it like this. It is a slow and invisible. It's not a sudden crash. It, how can I phrase it? It's a leak. It's a steady leak of opportunities, and when it finally gets to the point where it's feeling urgent enough to address. You've lost a long time and and you've likely set yourself up for a situation where instead of just needing improvements and adjustments, you might need to start from scratch with your copy and your design. All right. Let's talk about the second reason why your website is not getting prioritized like it should. That is actually dopamine. Here's how our brains work. We are wired for immediate feedback and rewards. We get these dopamine hits from quick wins, from visible results and from external validation. This is why social media is so addictive. It creates instant feedback loops that our brains absolutely love. You know, think about it. You post something on Instagram and within minutes you can see likes, comments, and people engaging with what you're sharing. That's instant feedback. That's immediate validation. Your brain loves this. Or let's put social media to the side.'cause that's always like an obvious first choice to pick on for these kind of things. Think about email marketing. You send out an email to your list and with within hours less, depending on the size of the list you have, you actually get, open rates, click rates, maybe even people responding. If you're doing a good job asking for engagement, again, that's almost immediate feedback. You know, right away if it's working, it feels productive. It feels exciting, it feels rewarding. So let's compare that to the website. You spend a lot of time or a lot of money creating or updating a website and then what? There's no likes, there's no comments, there's no like, , emails that just check in to say, great job on that website. Obviously, I'm gonna pause here for a second. I will recommend to my clients that they create a website launch plan that is not just like a one day, one time thing that kind of staggers over, a short, brief time after they launch, so that they do get some of this feedback and excitement build in. But in reality, once it's launched, it's launched, no one's really commenting on it. You don't get a notification when someone reads your homepage. You don't get a heart or a, like when someone feels like they like you, if they look at your about page, the feedback loop is slow, indirect, and in some cases completely invisible. So. Your brain doesn't get that reward for working on your website, and it feels like unrewarding work. Meanwhile, social media's right there, you know, email's right there. So you keep choosing these marketing tasks over your website, even though logically you know that your website is extremely important to your business. It's just that you don't get that same reward for doing the work. There's an irony to all of this because my friends social media posts disappear in less than a day. They do not stay in your followers feeds for long. Like yeah. You may have, like for example, Instagram, you may have a page that shows your post or your reels if you share them to your main page. But the algorithm boots them right out of the eyes of your viewers in a short period of time. Email campaigns, they get deleted, they get forgotten, if we're coming up against Black Friday, so they might not even get noticed. All of that hard work you have put into writing emails may not even get opened and just have mass deletes because there are too many emails the last two weeks of November. So all these things are quick wins. They might give you the dopamine, but you only get that dopamine, that feeling, that reward for very teeny tiny time. However, your website works 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 or 66 during a leap year, days a year. Every single person who Googles you, every person who gets referred to you, anyone who sees you speak, hears you on a podcast, they come to your website almost always first. It's one of the most important marketing assets you could possibly have, but it doesn't give you a dopamine hit, and because you don't get that instant gratification, it gets deprioritized. Okay. Let us talk about the third reason that your website takes the back burner. And that is a very practical reason. Overwhelm. Updating your website doesn't feel like one task and it shouldn't. I can't tell you how many times people say like, oh, I've had update my website on my to-do list if they plan to DIY. And I'm like, well, that's like more than a hundred tasks right there. Update Your website is too vague. It is too big because there are too many moving parts. Where do you start your homepage? Your about page, your services page, your shop, and no, you can't start on the shop if that's what you were thinking, because you then have to do every single product before you can do the entire shop. Do you need new photos? What about your testimonials? Should you redo your navigation, update your brand messaging? What about the blog? Goodness gracious. Decision fatigue probably already just kicked in for you. You might just have tuned out and you're like, oh God, I'm feeling triggered. Do not say these things to me. Well, that's overwhelm right there. And what happens is when you feel overwhelmed, you often don't begin. Think of it as an all or nothing trap. You think you need to fix everything at once? A complete overhaul, a total rewrite, a full redesign, and that feels massive. It feels time consuming and it feels very expensive. So you don't do anything because you can't do everything. You tell yourself that when you have more time or more energy, or more budget or more, whatever you think you need, you'll do it. We talked about this back in, I guess, I don't know, episode 1 67, maybe one. The early episode in this mini series. You don't need to fix everything at once. Remember, your job in improving your website is to look at it as a glow up and not a tear down. You could just start with a few headlines. You could just add one new strong testimonial or clarify your calls to action. Small specific tasks actually do move the needle But if you don't know how to break, quote, unquote, fix website down into an actual long list of tasks. You don't know how to move forward and that is overwhelm. So it keeps getting pushed to next week, next month, next year, and nothing ever changes. You probably are feeling triggered because you likely fell into one, two, or all three of those reasons why your website's getting deprioritized. But before I end this lecture, obviously, apparently that I'm doing, I wanna talk about. What your website actually influences so that you can see why this is actually a bigger problem than you might realize. And that's because your website influences almost everything in your business. First credibility before someone's gonna book a call with you, they check your website. After someone gets referred to you from a colleague or friend, they're likely gonna view your website before reaching out to get a feel for what you do in addition to the recommendation that they've received. Your website does the credibility work in the background, even when you're not aware of it. Every single day, people form opinions about your business based on the site that you have, and if it is unclear or outdated. If it does not inspire confidence, you lose opportunities you didn't even know about. Next, it's your pricing. If your website looks outdated or unclear, people will automatically assume you are cheaper or less experienced than you actually are. But if your website does signal premium work, you know, clear positioning, strong proof, confidence, people will also then show up expecting premium prices. Your website is literally influencing what people. Are willing to pay you before you have a conversation with them, before they actually potentially see the figures, like the cost figures on your services pages. Your website also influences your sales conversions because if it does its job well. People are already showing up to sales calls mostly sold on working with you, and that is exactly what you want from a discovery call. You do not want to educate on a discovery call. What you should be doing is clarifying details. You know, maybe your potential new client has a few questions for you and you definitely wanna make sure that you're a, a good fit for each other. If your website's not doing its job, you are starting from scratch on every single call. You have to explain what you do. You have to build credibility from zero. You have to overcome objections, and that's exhausting. A good website is supposed to do all of that heavy lifting for you before the call even happens. Your website again, I, I mentioned this kind of briefly a few seconds ago when I started this little section of this episode. Your website is affecting your referrals. People, even if you've had a really good client experience, people will refer you based on how confident they feel sending someone to your website. And even if they don't love it or don't think it is as quality as the work that you're do doing, what they'll do is still send it. But it's that disclaimer that will happen. Like I know her website's old, but I promise she does really good work or. I don't know if she actually has that service on her page or I don't know if she sells that product on her site, but she does. I, she sold it to me. Those kind of things. You don't want disclaimers. If you are, if the people who are referring you are proud to share your site, if they know that all of your offers are there and you've done a good job explaining what you do, I think there's a better chance that you'll get referred more often and definitely more enthusiastically. All right, we're talking again about what your website influences, and let's talk about marketing efficiency. All of your other marketing, your social media, your email list, your in-person networking, your podcast appearances, whatever it is that you're doing, drives people back to your website. Ding, ding, ding. Like, I'm just, I'm being repetitive. I know, but let's, let's talk more about this. Your website is the hub. Everything else is just pointing back to it. And if it doesn't convert those visitors. You are putting a ton of marketing effort in for something that's potentially wasted, right? Like all those podcast guest appearances, they take time out of your day. You know, you put a lot of effort into the pitches that you do in order to get on the podcast, and then what you send it back to a website that doesn't really do a good job of, of portraying you as a business owner. And doesn't convert on those podcast listeners, a new audience coming into your world that's not efficient. You work so hard to get people to your website and if your website isn't closing the deal, it is such wasted effort and, and I know I'm lecturing now, so let's just end it with this one. Your website's also influencing your mental energy. Every time you share your website with a disclaimer, like, sorry, I know it needs updating or. Here's a service that's kind of like what you're looking for. I definitely do what you need. You undermine yourself every time that you then avoid networking or speaking opportunities because you're embarrassed by your site or you don't have a speaker page. You limit your growth, the mental drain of knowing that your website is not good enough. Of feeling like you can't show up because your online presence doesn't match the quality of your work that is real and that significantly costs you. So here's the compounding cost of leaving your website on the back burner every month. You wait, is another month of potential clients lost, lower perceived value, harder sales conversations, fewer referrals, less effective marketing. And honestly, one of the biggest ones I think you should be paying to is the actual mental and emotional drain. Your website being deprioritized is not just another minor inconvenience. It's actively costing you. So here's the pattern you might be noticing. If you followed along the whole series and listened to this whole lecture based episode, you know what is wrong with your website? You know what needs to be fixed. You know it matters, but you're still not doing it. That is exactly why I created my group program, , which you'll learn all about on Wednesday, and you'll get a sneak peek into if you come to my homepage, hot seat tomorrow. Because knowing what to do and actually doing it are two very different things. Sometimes you need structure. You need deadlines. You need accountability. You need support. You need someone to help you break it down into manageable pieces and actually make it happen instead of letting it sit on your to-do list for another six months. So join me tomorrow at Homepage Hot Seat. There is still time to register and there is still time to put your site as a potential site that I review during our workshop. The, the links to how to do that are in the show notes, , and anywhere on social media that you find me. Sign up, share your website, and learn about how to improve on things in a way that feels good. This is not a tear down workshop, let me tell you that. I want you to go and I want you to feel like you can be confident in improving your site. So come if you can. I would love that. And if you can't. You, you get those earphones back on on Wednesday. Because I am going to go over every detail of my group program because I do not want one person joining if they are not really confident that it could help them really move the needle on their marketing needs. I want you to get websites that you are so proud of. I am. Desperate to get people to stop putting disclaimers on social media when they share their site. So I wanna help you get there, get to the point where you're super confident and you're like, heck yeah. Check out my website. It is damn good. Okay. We will sum this up by saying come tomorrow if you can. If you cannot come back to your podcast, Player, so you can hear everything about my group program on Wednesday. And if you have any questions, reach out on social media, respond to my emails, and I will answer them as best as possible. All right, see you in a couple days. We'll keep talking. Copy.