One of the most common situations PTW encounters when starting a diagnostic: the company has a web provider — an agency, a freelancer, someone they trust — who “looks after the site”. The site exists, it gets updated now and then, and nobody is actively complaining.
When the real data gets reviewed, what shows up is unindexed pages, generic title tags, poor load speed on mobile, and backups nobody has ever verified. The site exists, yes. But it isn’t being managed with any judgement.
The problem isn’t always bad intent. More often it’s the absence of clear metrics and explicit agreements about what the service is meant to deliver.
The mistake of measuring activity instead of results
Most relationships with web providers get evaluated by activity: changes were made, articles were published, the design was updated. But activity is not the same as result.
A provider can be very active — publishing content, making visual changes, answering tickets — while the site loses rankings in Google, speed degrades with every plugin added, and the conversion rate has sat at zero for six months.
The right question isn’t “are they doing things?” but “is the site performing better than it was three months ago?”
What to ask, and what your provider should be able to answer
How much organic traffic does the site receive? A provider managing SEO, or simply “looking after the site”, should be able to answer this in seconds with data from Google Search Console or Analytics. If they don’t have access to those tools or aren’t reviewing them, there’s a management problem.
Where does the site rank for the searches that matter most? It isn’t enough that “there is SEO”. The concrete test is whether the site appears in the top results when someone searches for the company’s main service. If they don’t know, they aren’t measuring it.
When was the last backup, and how would it be restored? If the answer is “the hosting has automatic backups” with no specifics on frequency, location and restore process, the backups are nominal — they exist in theory, not in practice.
Are there active indexing errors in Search Console? 404s on pages receiving external links, pages accidentally blocked by robots.txt, mishandled duplicate content — all of it affects rankings and all of it is visible in Search Console. If the provider isn’t reviewing it periodically, those errors accumulate.
What is the current PageSpeed Insights score? Nobody needs to know it from memory, but they should be able to produce the number on the spot. And more importantly, they should have a record of how it has moved.
Signs the relationship isn’t working
Beyond the answers to those questions, there are behavioural signals that point to problems:
No proactive reporting. If the provider doesn’t send periodic updates on the state of the site — metrics, changes made, problems detected — they’re probably not monitoring it actively.
Changes without a prior backup. Any modification to the site should be preceded by a backup. If changes have been made without that step and something once went wrong, the process has a structural problem.
Change proposals that aren’t grounded in data. “We should change the design” or “we need more content”, with no data explaining why that will improve performance, is intuition dressed up as strategy.
No access to your own tools. The site, the hosting, the domain, Google Search Console, Google Analytics — the business owner should have access to all of it, not just the provider. If the day the relationship ends the provider walks away with the access, the company has lost control of its own asset.
What a good support service should include
A well-structured ongoing support service covers:
- Periodic system and plugin updates, with a documented backup beforehand
- Uptime monitoring (alerts if the site goes down)
- Monthly review of basic SEO and traffic metrics
- SSL and security-state verification
- Periodic reporting to the client on what was done and where things stand
This isn’t an impossible standard — it’s what should be the minimum for a B2B corporate site the company considers a business tool.
When it makes sense to change provider
Not necessarily when the site is in poor shape. Sometimes the relationship has other value — trust, availability, historical knowledge of the project — that justifies investing in better processes before switching.
But it does make sense to consider a change when there’s no transparency in the data, when basic questions about the state of the site can’t be answered, or when the current provider doesn’t have the technical capability for what the site needs at this stage of the business.
Before switching, it pays to run a diagnostic on the real state of the site. That defines precisely what needs solving — and whether the current provider can solve it or not.
PTW works with companies arriving in any of these situations: no provider, a provider who isn’t performing, or a site that simply hasn’t been reviewed in far too long. The strategic diagnostic starts from real data, not assumptions.