How do I know if my website needs replacing?

Most of the sites we replace aren't broken. Nothing errors, nothing is down. They're just old, built years ago by somebody competent, and quietly falling behind ever since.

That makes this a hard call to make about your own site. You've looked at it a hundred times. You're not seeing what a stranger sees on a phone on the bus.

So here are the signs, and two things you can check yourself in about a minute.

Seven signs, in rough order of how much they cost you

1. It's fiddly on a phone. You pinch, you scroll sideways, you tap something and hit the wrong link. Most of your visitors are on a phone. If it doesn't work there. It doesn't work.

2. It's slow. People give up waiting. They don't tell you, and they don't come back. They just go to whoever loaded first.

3. It says things that stopped being true. Old prices, a service you dropped, hours from before you changed them, a staff member who left in 2021. This one is worse than it looks: a visitor who spots one thing that's wrong stops trusting all of it, including your phone number.

4. You have to ring somebody to change a price. Which means you don't. Which is how number three happens.

5. You're embarrassed to send the link. Genuinely the most reliable sign on this list. If somebody asks for your website and you'd rather send your Instagram. You already know.

6. It doesn't say where you work. No suburbs, no service area, no local anything. You're invisible to everyone searching for what you do plus where they live.

7. It was built on something nobody maintains any more. An old builder, a plugin that stopped updating, a Flash-era hangover. This is the one that becomes urgent without warning.

Two or three of these and you've probably got a few years left. Five and it's costing you work now.

Two things you can check in a minute

Open it on your own phone, on mobile data. Not office wi-fi, mobile data, standing outside. That's the real test, and it's the one most owners have never done.

Time it. Count how long from tapping the link to being able to read something. Three seconds feels fine. Six feels broken. If you want a number rather than a count, our rebuild check will fetch your home page once and tell you how long it took to answer and how big it is. It doesn't sign in anywhere and doesn't store a copy.

Repair or replace?

Worth being straight about this, because we make money either way and the honest answer isn't always "replace".

Repair is right when the bones are fine and the content has drifted. If it's fast, works on a phone, and you can edit it. You don't need a new website. You need an afternoon updating it. Do that instead.

Replacing is right when the problem is the foundation. A site that's slow and awkward on a phone is slow and awkward because of how it was built, and no amount of editing changes that. Patching it costs more over two years than starting again, and you still end up with the old thing.

What a rebuild keeps

This is the part that stops people, and it shouldn't.

Your domain stays yours. Same address, nothing to tell anyone.

Your email keeps working. We don't touch those records without telling you first. That's the one people are most nervous about, and rightly.

Your Google listing stays exactly as it is, reviews and all.

Your words and photos come with you. We start from what's on your current site and keep what works, rather than making you write it all again. That's usually why a rebuild is faster than a first site, not slower.

You're not starting over. You're keeping everything that has value and rebuilding the part that's tired.

The realistic answer

If you read the list and recognised your site in five of them. You already knew before you got here. The reason it hasn't happened isn't that you're unsure. It's that it sounds like a project.

It's a week.