Seven signs your business website needs replacing

Websites do not retire. They do not send a card round the office and make a speech. They simply stop doing the job, and everyone carries on assuming they are still doing it, because who checks? Here are the seven signs, and, in the interests of fairness, two signs that the site is fine and you should stop worrying about it.

1. It does not work on a phone

More than half of your visitors are on one. Open your own site on yours and attempt something a customer would attempt: find the number, read a price, send the form. If you are pinching, squinting or accidentally ringing yourself, so is everyone else, and they do not love you enough to persevere.

2. Nobody knows how to change it

The person who built it emigrated, the login is in an email from 2021 that nobody can find, and changing the opening hours last Christmas took three weeks and a favour. A website you cannot change is a leaflet, and leaflets are things people write "IGNORE, OUT OF DATE" across in biro. This is also the most common reason firms come to us, and, annoyingly for us, it often does not need a rebuild: get the files, get the domain, agree a plain price for changes, and carry on.

3. It says a year, and the year is wrong

A copyright line reading 2022. A "latest news" item announcing the Christmas opening hours for a Christmas three years gone. Visitors treat dates as evidence of life. A stale one says the business may have quietly ceased, which is an odd thing to advertise about a business that has not.

4. It loads slowly

Three seconds on a phone with an ordinary signal is roughly the limit of human patience, and search engines have noticed that humans leave. The usual culprits are enormous photographs nobody compressed, or a platform loading forty scripts in order to display six paragraphs, which is a bit like hiring an orchestra to read you a shopping list.

5. It describes the business you used to be

You started as one person doing bookkeeping. You are now a limited company with four staff mostly doing year-end accounts. The site still says "friendly, affordable bookkeeping for local businesses", which is now both untrue and, worse, attracting exactly the clients you have outgrown.

6. Enquiries come from everywhere except the website

Referrals, the Google listing, someone's cousin. Lovely. But a website that never produces an enquiry is not neutral. It is the thing the referred client looked at before deciding, on reflection, not to bother. A site does not have to be a lead machine. It should at least not be a lead sieve.

7. You would rather they did not see it

If you would prefer a prospective client found you by word of mouth than by looking at your website, you have already answered the question and are simply hoping someone else will say it out loud. Consider it said.

Two signs it is fine

If the site is old-fashioned but works on a phone, says true things about you and occasionally produces an enquiry, it does not need replacing. It may need photographs taken this decade and two new pages. Do not let anyone talk you into a rebuild when a tidy-up would do, and we include ourselves in "anyone".

And if your business genuinely runs on relationships and the website is a formality you never think about, leave it be. Some firms need a website that works hard. Some need one that exists, looks presentable and gives out the number. Both are respectable.

Replace or repair

Signs one, four and five are usually a rebuild, because they are about the bones. Two, three, six and seven can often be fixed by taking control of the site back and spending a modest amount on words and pictures. If you cannot tell which you have, we will look and tell you honestly, and if the honest answer is "keep it, change three pages", that is the answer you will get. If it does need replacing, the homepage mock-up costs nothing, so you can see the difference before you spend anything at all.