Here's a test you can run before your coffee goes cold. Open your website on your phone, hand it to a friend who has never seen it, and say: "Find out how to book." Then stay quiet and watch their thumb.
If they get there in ten seconds, good. If they pinch, zoom, scroll straight past the button you were sure was obvious, and finally ask "is it under Services?", you've just learned more than any analytics report will tell you. Deciding whether to redesign your website rarely comes down to taste. It comes down to moments like that one, repeated across every visitor you never get to watch.
Below are the seven signs we look for. Keep count as you read. There's a self-check scorecard after the list that does the math for you, and a plain answer on what to do with your score.
Sign 1: Your website is a pain to use on a phone
If your site was built a while ago, there's a fair chance it was designed for a desktop screen and squeezed onto phones afterwards. You can tell. Text you have to zoom to read. Buttons so close together you hit the wrong one. A menu that opens, covers everything and offers no obvious way out.
This matters twice. First, a big share of your visitors are on phones, often standing in a parking lot deciding who to call. Second, Google now looks mainly at the mobile version of your site when it decides how to rank it. It calls this mobile-first indexing. A site that's awkward on a phone is awkward for Google too.
Quick check: can someone call you from your homepage with a single tap? If your phone number is plain text rather than a tappable link, that's a five-minute fix. It's also usually a symptom of something bigger.
Sign 2: Your pages take too long to load
Nobody waits for a slow page out of loyalty. They tap back, pick the next result, and you never find out they were there.
Google measures loading experience with a set of signals it calls Core Web Vitals. The one most owners should care about is Largest Contentful Paint: how long it takes for the main thing on the page, usually a big photo or headline, to appear. Google's own guidance calls 2.5 seconds or less "good". You can test any page for free with Google's PageSpeed Insights tool, and it will tell you what's slowing it down.
The usual culprits on older sites are photos uploaded straight from a camera at full size, page builders that load code for features nobody uses, and a pile of plugins that someone installed years ago. Some of that can be fixed without a redesign. When the slowness is baked into the theme itself, it usually can't.
Sign 3: You apologize before you share the link
Listen to how you talk about your own site. "Ignore the photos, they're old." "That page is out of date." "It's on there somewhere."
If you hesitate to print your web address on a business card, the site has stopped doing its job. People size up a business by its website before they ever speak to you, the same way they judge a restaurant by its front door. A dated design doesn't only look old. It quietly suggests the business might be, too.
The giveaways are small: a copyright year in the footer that's several years behind, stock photos of smiling people in headsets, a "Latest news" section whose latest news is from another era. Each one is minor. Together they say nobody's home.
If you apologize for your website before you share it, it's already costing you work.
Sign 4: You can't update it yourself (or the person who built it vanished)
This is the one we hear most, and the most frustrating. The site was built by a nephew, a freelancer or an agency that has since stopped answering emails. Nobody's sure where the login is. Changing your opening hours means an email, an invoice and a two-week wait.
A website you can't change is a website that slowly stops being true. Ask yourself: if you needed to add a new service today, who would do it, and how long would it take? If the honest answer is "no idea", count this sign.
There's a quieter risk here too. If your domain name and hosting are registered to someone else, you don't fully own your online presence. Whoever builds your next site, make sure the domain is in your name and you hold the keys. It costs nothing to ask and saves a lot of grief later.
Sign 5: It gets visits but not inquiries
Traffic without inquiries usually points at the website, not the market. Look at your homepage through a stranger's eyes. Within a few seconds, can they tell what you do, who it's for and where you work? Is there one obvious next step, like "Get a free quote", or do they have to hunt for it?
Older sites tend to bury the action at the bottom of a long page or hide it behind a lonely "Contact" link in the menu. Others ask for far too much. A form with twelve fields will lose people who would happily have filled in three.
If you use Google Analytics or something similar, compare visits with form submissions and calls. If you have no idea how many inquiries your site produces, count this sign anyway. You can't fix what you can't see.
Sign 6: It describes a business you used to be
Businesses change faster than their websites. You've added services, dropped others, raised prices, hired people, maybe moved. The website still describes what you were selling the day it launched.
That causes real problems. Customers call asking for things you no longer do. The work you most want, usually the profitable stuff, is missing or buried three clicks deep. And Google can only rank you for what your pages actually say. If your best service doesn't have its own page, you are close to invisible for it in search. Our guide to local SEO basics explains why one page per service matters so much.
Sign 7: Browsers warn visitors your site is "Not secure"
Open your site in Chrome and look at the left of the address bar. If it says "Not secure", your site isn't using HTTPS, the encrypted connection that keeps things like contact form details private. Visitors see that warning before they see your logo. The certificate that switches HTTPS on is often free or included with hosting, so there's little reason to live with it.
The invisible version of this sign is a site running on software that no longer gets security updates: an old version of WordPress, plugins their developers abandoned, a server on an outdated version of PHP. You can't see any of that, but it's exactly what automated attacks scan the internet for. If nobody is keeping your site updated, that's the job our website hosting and maintenance plan does.
Score your own website
Time to count. Answer each question honestly; a "yes" means the sign applies to you. Your score updates as you go.
Self-check
The seven-sign scorecard
Seven questions, about two minutes. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere.
Start answeringYour score is the number of times you answered "yes".
- 0 to 1: In good shapeFix any single sign directly. No redesign needed.
- 2 to 3: Due a refreshFix the quick wins, then judge whether the problems are structural.
- 4 to 7: Time to redesignPatching one problem at a time will cost more than it saves.
Do you need a full redesign, or just a refresh?
A low score doesn't mean you should start again, and nobody should sell you a new website you don't need. Plenty of problems have smaller fixes:
- Slow because of huge images? Resize and compress them. On many older sites that alone makes a visible difference.
- Words out of date? Rewrite the pages and keep the design.
- No HTTPS? Install a certificate. On most hosting it's a short job.
- Contact details hard to find? Put a clear button and a tappable phone number in the header.
The time to redesign is when the problems are structural: the layout fights small screens, the theme itself is what makes it slow, or nothing can change without the original developer. Patching those is like repainting a house with a cracked foundation. It looks better for a while.
How to redesign your website without losing Google rankings
This is the part people skip, and it's where redesigns go wrong. Your current site may have pages that Google has been sending visitors to for years. If the new site changes those web addresses and nobody tells Google, rankings can slide and visitors land on error pages.
A sensible redesign plan covers four things:
- List the pages that bring in visitors now. Google Search Console, which is free, shows the pages and searches people find you through.
- Keep the same web addresses where you can. Where a page has to move, set up a 301 redirect: a permanent forwarding instruction from the old address to the new one.
- Carry over the words that work. If a page is found for "emergency furnace repair", the new version still needs to answer that search clearly.
- Check after launch. Watch Search Console in the weeks after go-live, and fix any broken links or missing pages quickly.
Every site we build has SEO basics built in, and redirects are part of our launch checklist, not an afterthought. Our website design page walks through how a project runs from first call to launch, and our pricing page shows what each package includes.
Three things to do this week
Whatever your score, these take less than an hour between them:
- Run the phone test from the top of this article with someone who's never seen your site. Write down where they got stuck.
- Put your homepage into PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile result, not the desktop one.
- Find out who owns your domain. Look up your registrar account, or ask whoever built the site. If it isn't you, start that conversation now, while everyone's still friendly.
If those three turn up problems, you'll have a far clearer brief for whoever fixes them, whether that's us or someone else.
Website redesign questions
How often should a small business redesign its website?
There's no fixed schedule, and anyone who gives you a precise number of years is guessing. Judge it by the signs rather than the calendar. A well-built site that's kept up to date can serve you for years; a neglected one can start to feel old surprisingly quickly.
Will a website redesign hurt my SEO?
It can if pages disappear or change address without redirects. Done carefully, keeping the useful content, setting up 301 redirects and making the site faster, a redesign can give your search visibility a stronger foundation than before.
How much does a website redesign cost?
It depends on how many pages you need and what the site has to do. Our website packages start at $1,500 for up to five pages, and every project gets a fixed quote after a free consultation, so you know the cost before any work begins. See our pricing for what each package includes.
