What are the signs you need a new website?
These are the ten we see most often. Count how many apply to yours.
- It's slow on a phone. Pages take a while to appear, or jump around as they load.
- It's hard to use on a phone: tiny text, buttons too close together, menus that don't work.
- It describes the business you were, not the one you are now: old services, old prices, old team.
- Enquiries have dropped and nothing else in the business explains it.
- Search traffic has fallen in Search Console over several months.
- You can't change it easily. Small edits need a developer, or break the layout.
- It runs on a theme, page builder or plugins nobody dares update.
- You can't tell which pages bring in enquiries, because tracking is missing or broken.
- You're embarrassed to send people to it, or you apologise for it on calls.
- AI assistants describe your business wrongly, or not at all, because the site doesn't say clearly what you do.
How do you check your website in 30 minutes?
Run these checks yourself. You don't need technical knowledge, just a phone and access to your accounts.
- Open your homepage on your phone on mobile data, not Wi-Fi, and time how long it takes to be usable.
- Try to get in touch as a customer would: find the phone number, fill in the form, and check the message arrives.
- Read your homepage and main service page. Do they describe what you sell today, in the words customers use?
- Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights on mobile and note the Core Web Vitals.
- Open Search Console and compare clicks over the last year with the year before.
- Check your analytics for enquiries or sales over the same period.
- Try to change one sentence on the site yourself, and note how long it takes.
- Ask an AI assistant what your business does, and see whether the answer is right.
When don't you need a new website?
When the site is fast, easy to change and the problem is narrow. Weak copy can be rewritten. A slow page can often be sped up. A form that doesn't convert can be fixed and tested. None of those needs a rebuild on its own.
A new site also won't fix a problem that isn't the site. If nobody visits it, the answer may be SEO or ads first. If visitors arrive but don't enquire, conversion work on the current site may be quicker.
Signs you need a new website vs signs you need a fix
A simple rule: if the problems are about what the site says, fix the copy. If they're about how the site is built, such as speed, editing, plugins or tracking that won't stay working, rebuild.
Rebuilding also makes sense when the fixes would take longer than starting again. If your list of changes is long and each one is a project, a clean rebuild is often faster and cheaper overall.
How long can you leave an old website?
There's no fixed age when a website expires. Some older sites work well; some new ones don't. Judge it on results: speed, enquiries, search traffic and how easily you can change it.
What does cost money is waiting. Every month an underperforming site stays live, it sends some of your potential customers to competitors.