Your website's been up a few years and something about it bugs you. Maybe it looks dated next to a competitor's, or the phone isn't ringing from it the way it used to. The easy assumption is that it needs replacing. Often it doesn't. A lot of tired sites are a weekend of fixes away from doing their job.
Here's how I'd work out which one you've got before you spend anything.
Look at it on your phone first
Google looks at the mobile version of your site when it decides where you rank. Its own mobile-first indexing guide says it indexes and ranks using the mobile version of your pages. So the desktop view you check at your desk isn't the one that counts.
Open your site on your phone and try to do what a customer would:
- Find what you do and where you work in the first screen.
- Tap your phone number and see if it rings.
- Fill in the contact form and check the email arrives.
- Find one service page without pinching or zooming.
If all four work, your site's in better shape than you think.
Check how fast it loads
Put your home page into PageSpeed Insights. It's Google's free tool, and where it has enough visitors to go on, it shows how your site performed for real people over the last 28 days, according to Google's notes on how PageSpeed Insights works.
Look at the mobile result. Google's Core Web Vitals guide sets a good loading score as the main content showing within 2.5 seconds. A slow score usually comes down to oversized photos or too many plugins. Both are fixable without starting over.
Signs it just needs fixing
These are repairs, not reasons to rebuild:
- Old photos, old prices or a service you've stopped offering.
- A contact form that's stopped sending, or a phone number you can't tap.
- Slow pages caused by huge images.
- Pages that only say "we do plumbing" without saying where or for whom.
- No page for a service you want more of. You can add one.
Most of that is copy and housekeeping. If you can log in and edit your own pages, you can do a fair bit of it yourself.
Signs it's time to start again
A rebuild starts making sense when the problem is underneath the content:
- It still doesn't work properly on a phone, and the theme can't be fixed.
- Nobody can log in, or the person who built it has gone and taken the access with them.
- The platform's no longer updated, so security patches have stopped.
- Every small change needs a developer, so nothing gets updated.
- Your business has changed enough that the pages, menus and structure no longer fit.
One of those on its own might still be fixable. Two or three together, and you're usually paying more to patch it than you'd pay to replace it.
If you rebuild, keep what's working
If your current site shows up on Google for anything, don't throw that away. Every old page address needs a redirect to the matching new page, so Google and anyone with a bookmark ends up in the right place. Google's guide to moving a site with URL changes covers how that works. Skip it and a new site can rank worse than the old one for months.
The same goes for your email, domain and booking tools. They're often tied to the old site's hosting, so they need moving deliberately, not switched off with it. Our guide on what goes into the price of a website has a list of what to ask about.
What I'd do this week
Run the four phone checks above and put your home page through PageSpeed Insights. Write down what fails. If it's a short list of content and speed issues, fix those first and see how the next month goes. If you're ticking boxes in the rebuild list, that's when it's worth talking to someone about web design.