Is My Website Outdated? 9 Signs It Is Costing You Customers

The short answer

Your website is outdated if it is hard to use on a phone, slow to load, shows old information, has a 'Not secure' warning in the browser bar, or simply does not produce calls and quote requests. Any one of those costs you some customers. If two or more of the nine signs below describe your site, it is usually time to fix it or replace it.

You can check every sign yourself in about 30 seconds with your phone and a web browser. You do not need to be technical, and some of these problems are quick, inexpensive fixes rather than a reason to start over.

Why an outdated website quietly costs you work

Old websites almost never crash. They keep working just well enough that nobody notices the leak. Say a homeowner in Westerville wakes up to a cold house. She pulls up two or three heating companies on her phone, spends about a minute comparing them, and calls the one that looks current and easy to reach. She never tells the other two why she passed.

I hear a version of the same story from a lot of Central Ohio owners. The site was built eight or ten years ago by a freelancer, a relative, or a company that has since gone quiet. It still loads, so it never felt urgent. Meanwhile phones changed, Google changed, and the business itself changed, and the website stayed exactly where it was.

The 9 signs your website is outdated, and how to check each one

Grab your phone and go down this list. Each check takes about 30 seconds.

• You have to pinch and zoom on a phone. Open your site on your own phone. If the text is tiny, the buttons are hard to tap, or you have to scroll sideways, the site was not built for mobile, and most local customers see your site on a phone first.
• It is slow. Load your homepage on your phone using cellular data, not Wi-Fi. If it takes more than roughly three seconds to show something useful, a lot of visitors will hit the back button before they see your name.
• The browser says 'Not secure.' Look at the address bar in Chrome. That label means the site has no SSL certificate (the small piece of setup that encrypts the connection), and it makes people nervous about typing their name and phone number into your form.
• The information is old. Scroll to the footer. A copyright year from years ago, photos of staff who have left, an old phone number, or a service you no longer offer all tell a visitor that nobody is minding the store.
• There is no phone number or quote button at the top. On your phone, see whether you can call or request a quote without scrolling. If you cannot, you are making a ready customer hunt for you.
• You do not show up when you search for your own service. Search your main service plus your town, for example 'furnace repair Westerville' or 'bathroom remodel Dublin'. If you are not on the first page or in the map results, your site is not doing its job in search.
• You cannot update it yourself. Try to change one sentence on your site this week. If you do not have the login, or the only person who can make changes has stopped returning calls, you do not really control your own website.
• It looks like a 2012 site next to your competitors. Put your site and two competitors side by side. Tiny text, rotating sliders, and stock photos of people shaking hands in a boardroom make an established company look like it stopped paying attention.
• The phone and contact form are quiet even though you are busy. Count the calls and form submissions that came from the website last month. If nearly all your work comes from word of mouth and the site produces almost nothing, it is not pulling its weight.

Want a faster way to check?

If you would rather not go through the list by hand, there are free tools that do part of it for you. Google PageSpeed Insights will tell you how your site loads on a phone, though the report is written for developers and can be hard to read.

A simpler option is to grade your website with my free health check. You type in your web address and in a few seconds you get a score from 0 to 100 for speed, mobile, SEO basics, and security, along with a plain-English list of what to fix. There is no signup, and you can run it on a competitor too, which is often the most eye-opening part.

Can it be fixed, or does it need a rebuild?

Not every outdated site needs to be thrown away, and a good designer should tell you so honestly. Some of the signs above are quick fixes. Adding an SSL certificate, putting your phone number and a quote button at the top of every page, and updating the footer, staff photos, and service list can often be done in a few hours on a site that is otherwise sound.

Other signs point to a rebuild. If the site is not mobile-friendly at all, it is usually cheaper to rebuild than to retrofit. The same goes for a site on a platform or theme nobody maintains anymore, or one so tangled that every small change breaks something else. Patching those tends to cost more over time than starting fresh.

A simple rule of thumb: if your problems are mostly about content and contact details, fix them. If they are about how the site is built, plan a rebuild.

What to do if your web designer has disappeared

This is one of the most common situations I see in Columbus, Dublin, Hilliard, and the rest of Central Ohio. The person who built the site has moved on, and the owner is not sure who controls the domain, the hosting, or the login.

Start by finding out where your domain name is registered and whose name is on the account. That matters more than anything else, because whoever controls the domain controls your website and your email. Then track down the hosting account and any website login. If you hire someone new, get it in writing that you own the site, the domain, and every account. My clients get exactly that, so they are never stuck again.

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