Seven signs that are actually real
- It is painful on a phone. Pinching to read, a menu that will not close, a form you cannot complete one-handed. Most of your visitors are on a phone, so this is not a detail.
- It describes a business you no longer run. Services you dropped, prices from three years ago, a team member who left. This costs you the wrong enquiries and loses you the right ones.
- You cannot change anything without asking someone. If updating your opening hours requires an email and a wait, the site is already failing you.
- Nobody contacts you through it. First check the form actually works — send yourself a test today, including checking your spam folder. Broken forms are far more common than anyone believes.
- It is slow. Genuinely slow, on mobile data, not just today. Usually four causes.
- It has a security warning. A missing or expired certificate makes browsers tell every visitor the site is unsafe. Fix within the day.
- It does not say where you work or what you charge. Two omissions that quietly disqualify you before anyone gets in touch.
Reasons that are not good enough on their own
- A competitor got a new site. Their new site may be worse. You cannot tell from the outside.
- Someone said it looks dated. Ask them what they were trying to do when they noticed. That answer is the useful part.
- You want a different colour. That is an afternoon, not a project.
- A cold email said your SEO score was 34. Those emails are automated, the score is theatre, and the sender has not looked at your site.
The cheaper job that often works
Before quoting a rebuild I look for the smallest change that fixes the actual complaint. Often it is a new homepage on the existing site, a rewritten services page, a repaired contact form, and an hour spent compressing images. That is a fraction of a redesign and it addresses the thing that was losing you work.
A full rebuild earns its cost when the underlying structure is fighting you — when the platform cannot be made fast, when nothing can be edited, or when every fix breaks something else. Then rebuilding is the cheaper option, not the more ambitious one.
Ask any designer, including me: what is the smallest thing that would fix this? Anyone unwilling to answer that question is selling you a project rather than solving a problem.
Keep what is working
A redesign that throws away pages already bringing people in is an expensive way to go backwards. Before anything changes, note which pages get visits, which URLs exist, and what people were looking for. Anything that disappears needs to redirect somewhere sensible, or you will lose the traffic and spend a year earning it back.