Is my website too old? Six signs, with fixes

Open your site on your own phone. If you have to pinch to read the menu, or the text runs off the right edge, the site was built before phones were where people look. Most of your customers look you up on a phone first, often in the car park before they ring. A site that shrinks the desktop page to fit tells them the business hasn’t looked at itself lately.

The fix is not a plugin. A layout that was drawn for a wide screen has to be redrawn for a narrow one, which is most of a redesign.

© 2018. It sounds trivial, and it is the first thing a buyer notices, because it is the one date on the page. A stale year says nobody has touched the site since then, and they extend that to the certificates, the prices and the team photo.

Two fixes. The cheap one is a line of code that prints the current year. The real one is a site somebody actually updates, which is what the year was supposed to prove.

We see this every week: a Facebook icon that opens facebook.com’s own homepage, because the template shipped with placeholder links and nobody filled them in. A visitor who clicks it learns two things. The site was never finished, and the business isn’t on Facebook after all.

Fix: link them or remove them. Empty is better than broken.

Google’s own phone test gives you a number for this. Type your address into PageSpeed Insights and look at the first line: how long until the biggest thing on the page appears. Under two and a half seconds is the target. We regularly measure established companies at twenty. That is not a technical detail. It is the moment people leave.

The fix depends on the cause. Sometimes it is one enormous image. More often it is a decade of plugins, sliders and tracking scripts stacked on a theme that was never fast, and the honest answer is to rebuild on an architecture where fast is the default state, not a maintenance project.

If your site still loads over plain http, every visitor on Chrome sees a warning next to your name. Browsers started doing that in 2018. A certificate is free and takes an afternoon, so a site that still lacks one is telling people no one is looking after it.

A new product, a new phone number, a new team member. If each of those means an email to a developer and a two-week wait, the site has stopped being yours. This is the sign owners feel most and mention least, because it looks like a process problem rather than a website problem.

The fix is a content system your own staff can use without breaking the layout. On our builds that is WordPress for the editing and a separate, hand-built frontend for the visitors, so an editor can change every word and image and still can’t move a pixel of the design.

• One sign: fix it this week. Most are an afternoon.
• Two or three: get a written teardown before you spend anything. It will tell you whether a repair or a rebuild is cheaper over three years.
• Four or more: the site is costing you enquiries now. A redesign that keeps your search rankings is the job, and the ranking part is the one most agencies get wrong.

If you want a second opinion on your own site, send us the address. We will reply with the six checks done, whether or not you hire us.