Forty-Nine Clicks

Three months of search data killed the careful renovation plan — and my website moved into a chat window.

Forty-nine clicks.

That’s what Google Search sent my consulting website over three whole months. Seven and a half years of a business. Fifty blog posts. A domain I’d been told — and had told myself — was an asset too valuable to walk away from.

Forty-nine clicks. And most of those were people typing my company’s name because they already knew me.

I found this out on a Wednesday, mid-project. I was rebuilding my web presence for the next chapter — the plan was to renovate the old site in place, carefully, protecting all that precious SEO. The way you’d restore a historic house.

Then my AI coworker pulled the actual Search Console numbers, and the historic house turned out to be a shed.

Here’s what I want to tell you about, though. Not the shed. The part that came after.

The waiting

Every website I’ve ever owned was built by someone else. A designer built the first one. A second designer fixed what the first one left behind. That’s not a complaint about either of them — they’re talented people. It’s a description of a process. The process where you write a brief, and wait. Review a mockup, and wait. Notice a typo three weeks after launch and decide it’s not worth the email.

That last one is the tell. When changing your own website costs a favor, an invoice, or an apology for bothering someone — you stop changing it. The site freezes into whoever you were the year you could afford the project. Mine had been describing a previous version of my business for longer than I’d like to admit.

So this time I did it differently.

The terminal

I opened a terminal — the plain black window programmers use — where Claude Code runs. Not a website builder. Not a template gallery. A working session, like sitting with a very fast colleague. I talked. It built. I redirected — warmer, fewer words, that story goes on this page, take the prices off entirely. It rebuilt while I watched.

In one session we went from nothing to a five-page site: home, two doors for the two kinds of work I do, a speaking page, an about page. Written from my own words — my documented voice, my real stories, my actual career facts — because I’d spent the weeks before putting all of that somewhere my AI coworker could read it.

Then it deployed the site. From the same window. No hosting company, no control panel, no person to schedule. The domain cost me about twenty-seven dollars a year, and buying it was genuinely the most complicated thing I did — because it’s the one step I insist on doing myself.

And here’s the part that still gets me, weeks later: the site is never finished, and that’s the feature. When I want something changed now, I say it — in a chat, from my phone if I want. “Move that story up. Soften that line.” The change is live in minutes. Every previous version is kept, so nothing is ever lost and any change can be undone. I never touch code. I never will.

The honest line: I spent years believing this was a room I wasn’t allowed in. The terminal, the deploys, the infrastructure — that was for technical people, and my job was to write briefs and wait politely. I was wrong, and being wrong cost me years of a frozen website.

The website was never the hard part. The waiting was.

Know someone whose website is frozen in an old version of themselves? Forward them this.