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The average website I look at in 2026 has been built, consciously or not, for a desktop user sitting at a desk with time to spare. Clean navigation, generous whitespace, hover states that work beautifully with a mouse. And somewhere in the analytics, a mobile traffic share sitting between 55% and 70%, with a bounce rate that would make a direct mail copywriter weep.

Earlier this year I had a discovery call with a business owner who wanted a website refresh. Typical brief. The site felt dated, the design hadn’t been touched in a few years, they wanted something more modern. We were maybe ten minutes into the conversation when I asked about their analytics.

Every Chinese New Year, the same thing happens. Businesses close for a few days. Teams rest. Families eat. And then, usually somewhere between the second and fifth day of the new year, the phones and the inboxes and the websites wake back up — all at once.

I spent the break between Christmas and New Year doing work that will never appear in a case study. No client will reference it in a testimonial. It won’t show up in a proposal or impress anyone on a discovery call. It was internal systems work, and it was some of the most valuable time I’ve spent in years.

I’ve been building websites since 1998. In that time I’ve watched the industry develop a reliable pattern: everyone ignores the infrastructure until the infrastructure ignores them back.

There is a version of this story I have seen dozens of times. A business gets a website built for a few thousand dollars. It looks reasonable. It loads. The team signs off on it and moves on. Three years later, nothing has changed — the site still loads, it still looks roughly the same, and it is still generating almost no enquiries. Nobody connects those two facts.