Seven signs your business website needs a redesign
Looking dated is the least important reason to rebuild a website. Here are the signs that actually cost you work, and the ones that only cost you pride.
“It looks dated” is the reason most business owners give for wanting a new website. It is almost never the reason they actually need one.
A dated site that loads fast, says clearly what the business does and makes calling easy will out-earn a beautiful one that does none of those things. So before spending money on a rebuild, it is worth separating the signs that cost you work from the ones that only cost you pride.
Here are the seven that matter, roughly in order of how much they cost.
1. It is slow or awkward on a phone
This is first because it is the most expensive and the most commonly dismissed.
Open your site on your own phone, on mobile data rather than your office wifi. Count the seconds until you can read something and tap something. If text is too small, if you have to pinch and zoom, if a menu is hard to hit with a thumb, or if images arrive one slow block at a time — that is most of your potential customers’ entire experience of your business.
“It looks fine on my laptop” is not a defence. Most local-service traffic is mobile, and a meaningful share of it is on a connection far worse than yours.
2. You cannot update it yourself, or nobody can
Two versions of the same problem.
Either you depend on someone who no longer replies, or the site is built on something nobody wants to touch. Either way, the practical effect is identical: your hours are wrong, your services are out of date, and a job you stopped offering two years ago is still the first thing people see.
A website that cannot change is a brochure printed in 2019 and never reordered.
3. It does not say what you do or where you do it
Read your homepage as a stranger. In the first few seconds, can you tell what is being sold, who it is for, and where it is offered?
A surprising number of business sites open with “Welcome to our website” and a paragraph about commitment to quality. That tells a visitor nothing they could not have assumed, and it costs you the only seconds you reliably get.
If you serve a specific area, the area belongs near the top. Not buried on a contact page.
4. It is not getting found, and the structure is why
This one needs care, because “we don’t rank” has many causes and not all of them are the website’s fault.
But there is a structural version worth checking. If every service you offer lives on one combined “Services” page, you have asked a search engine to understand that one page is about six different things. It will rank for none of them well. Six pages, each genuinely about one service, is a different site to a search engine even though it is the same information.
Same with location. One page that lists twenty towns in a paragraph is not a local presence.
5. Nothing on it asks for the job
Count the places a visitor can take action. Then count how obvious they are on a phone, without scrolling.
Plenty of sites have a contact page and nothing else — no phone number in the header, no call button that follows you, no form on the page where the decision actually gets made. The visitor has to go looking for the way to hire you, and a good share of them will not.
6. It undersells work you are proud of
This is the one I see most with trades, contractors and studios: the work is genuinely excellent, and the site shows three small photos from 2018.
If you do visual work, the portfolio is the sale. It should be the spine of the site, not a subpage. And it should be real photographs of your jobs, not stock images — a visitor is not grading your photography, they are deciding whether you are real.
7. It is actively untrustworthy
Some things actively lose the sale rather than just failing to win it:
- no padlock in the address bar — browsers now warn visitors outright
- a contact form that goes nowhere, which is more common than anyone admits
- broken links, missing images, or a copyright line from several years ago
- phone numbers or addresses that are no longer correct
Test your own contact form today. Fill it in and check it arrives. I find broken ones regularly, and the business never knew.
What is not on this list
“Competitors have a newer-looking site.” Maybe relevant, maybe not. If theirs answers questions yours does not, that is sign three or five, and that is what to fix.
“I’m bored of it.” A real feeling, but not a business case on its own.
“Someone said it needs to be modern.” Ask them to be specific. “Modern” usually turns out to mean one of the seven above, and naming which one makes the project cheaper and better.
The honest conclusion
If you recognised one or two of these, you probably need targeted fixes rather than a rebuild. Speed, a clearer headline, a visible phone number and a working form are often a few days of work, not a project.
If you recognised four or more — especially if the site cannot be updated at all — you are maintaining something that is working against you, and a rebuild is usually cheaper than continuing to patch it.
If you want a straight answer about which of those you are, the free homepage demo is one way to see it: I design the concept first, you decide after. Here is what a redesign involves. Or just tell me what is wrong with it and I will tell you honestly whether it needs rebuilding.