Your Website Should Come With a Receipt

Twelve months ago, if you’d said “version control” to me, I’d have assumed you were talking about spreadsheet naming. You know the drill. homepage_final.html. homepage_final_v2.html. homepage_FINAL_FINAL_actually_this_one.html.

I’ve been building websites for twenty-six years and I’d never used Git. I’ve never needed to. I worked in WordPress, I hit “Update”, and whatever was there before was gone. If something broke, I’d fix it. If I couldn’t remember what I’d changed, I’d squint at the screen and try to work it out.

That was fine. Until it wasn’t.

When Your Rankings Drop and Nobody Knows Why

Here’s something that happens to every business with a website.

Your rankings drop. Not catastrophically — you don’t fall off a cliff overnight. But a page that was sitting at position five for a keyword you care about quietly slides to position fifteen. Then twenty. Then it’s gone.

You ask your web person. They shrug. “Google updates its algorithm all the time.” They run a crawl report that shows you a hundred technical issues, most of which existed before the drop and will exist after. They suggest writing more content. You do. Nothing changes.

Nobody knows why your rankings moved. Not your SEO consultant, not your developer, not Google themselves. Because nobody kept a record of what actually changed on your site and when.

I had this exact problem. Last December, I removed some old content from my own website. Fifteen posts that felt outdated — old references to platforms I no longer recommend, generic advice I’d outgrown. Editorially, it was the right call. Every single page deserved to go.

Within five days, my best-performing keyword dropped from position five to position forty-nine.

The Receipt

Here’s where the story changes. Because by December, I was using Git.

I didn’t have to guess what happened. I didn’t have to run a crawl report or check Google’s algorithm update history or wonder if it was seasonal. I opened my version history and looked.

One change. One date. Fifteen pages removed in a single update. I could see exactly which pages, exactly what content was on them, exactly when they disappeared from the site. Not a theory. A receipt.

The diagnosis took five minutes. Five minutes to identify a problem that would have taken weeks of speculation otherwise — and might never have been identified at all.

What Version Control Actually Is

I’m going to explain this without any jargon, because twelve months ago I needed someone to explain it to me without jargon.

Every time I make a change to a website — update a heading, add a page, change a layout, fix a bug — I save that change with a short description. “Added pricing section to homepage.” “Removed outdated blog posts.” “Fixed mobile menu not closing.”

Those descriptions stack up over time. Hundreds of them. Each one timestamped, each one showing exactly what changed in every file.

If you’re thinking “that sounds like track changes in Word” — it’s that, but for your entire website. Every page, every component, every line of code. And it never forgets.

Why This Matters for Your Business

This isn’t a developer tool. I mean, it is — developers have used version control for decades. But the business value isn’t something that gets talked about. Developers take it for granted.

Think about what your accountant does. Every transaction recorded. Every receipt filed. Every penny traceable from bank statement to invoice to expense category. If HMRC asks “why did you claim this?”, you’ve got the paper trail.

Your website should work the same way.

When a client’s rankings shift, I don’t guess. I look at the record. “I changed your homepage title on the 14th. Your rankings moved on the 19th. Here’s the before and after.” That’s not an SEO report with traffic graphs and educated speculation. It’s a receipt.

WordPress can’t do this. Not really. WordPress tracks content revisions — what the text said before and after — but it doesn’t track template changes, layout changes, technical configuration, routing, or anything structural.

The Journey

If you’re sitting there thinking “this sounds technical and I’m not technical” — that was me twelve months ago.

My first saved changes were one-word descriptions. I barely understood what I was doing. The tool felt alien. I made mistakes. I accidentally overwrote things. I had to ask for help more times than I’d like to admit.

But I kept going. One change a day. Just the discipline of recording what I did and why.

After a month, I had a record. After three months, I had a history. After six months, I had something I didn’t expect — I could see the trajectory of my own business by reading the trail of changes I’d made. Not a retrospective I had to write. Not a project plan I had to update. Just the accumulated evidence of daily work.

What This Means for You

I’m not suggesting you learn Git. That’s my job, not yours. But I am suggesting you ask your web developer a simple question:

“If my rankings drop next month, can you show me exactly what changed on my site and when?”

If the answer is anything other than “yes, down to the specific line of code and the date it happened” — you don’t have version control. You have hope. And hope isn’t a business strategy.

Remember my December rankings drop? Position five to position forty-nine on my best keyword. That’s the kind of problem that keeps you up at night, refreshing Google Search Console at 2am, wondering what you did wrong. I had the answer in five minutes because I had the trail. Without it, I’d still be guessing.

The Part I Didn’t See Coming

I started recording changes because it seemed like good practice. Sensible. The kind of thing a responsible person does with their websites.

What I didn’t expect was that the trail would become more valuable than the work it was tracking.

After twelve months, I don’t just have a record of changes. I have the complete operational history of my business. Every client site, every content decision, every technical improvement — timestamped, searchable, and connected. When I sit down on a Monday morning, I can read what I did for each client last week without checking a single spreadsheet. The trail tells me.

When a new client asks “what does your process actually look like?”, I can show them. Not a brochure — the actual history. Twelve months of daily changes to real websites. That’s more convincing than any case study I could write because it isn’t written for them. It’s just the record of the work.

Here’s what I mean. I can search my entire history for “schema” and see every time I’ve added structured data to a client’s site — which pages, which type, what date. I can search for a client’s name and see every change I’ve ever made to their website, in order, with descriptions. I can compare what their site looked like six months ago with what it looks like today, page by page.

That kind of picture usually costs a consultant and a month of interviews. I’ve got it sitting there because I showed up and wrote a sentence every time I made a change.

And it compounds. That’s the bit that surprised me. Each day’s record is small — a sentence, a timestamp. But after a month you have a record. After three months you have a history. After six months you have a trajectory. After twelve months you have something that no WordPress agency can offer their clients: a complete, searchable, verifiable trail of every decision that shaped your website.

No special tools. No dashboard. No analytics platform. Just the accumulated trail of doing the work and recording what I did. The boring discipline turned out to be the most valuable thing I’ve built all year.

Twelve months ago I didn’t know what version control was. Now it’s the backbone of how I run my business — and how I serve my clients. The tool hasn’t changed. What I bring to it has.