Do I need a new website, or does my old one just need finding?

“We need a new website” is one of the most common things a small business says to us, and it is wrong about half the time.

Sometimes the site is genuinely holding the business back. Often it is perfectly serviceable and simply nobody is arriving at it — which is a completely different problem with a completely different price tag. Rebuilding a site nobody can find gets you a nicer site that nobody can find.

Here are the checks worth doing before you spend anything.

Check one: are you getting any visitors at all?

Open whatever analytics you have. If you have none, that is itself the finding — install something before you decide anything else.

Look at the last three months of traffic, and specifically at where it comes from. There is a meaningful difference between:

• Almost no visitors. You have a visibility problem. A new site will not fix it on its own.
• Visitors, but almost none from search. You have a findability problem. Possibly fixable on the existing site.
• Decent search traffic, no enquiries. Now we might be talking about a site problem — or about there being no way to get in touch out of hours.

Three genuinely different diagnoses, three different bills.

Check two: search for yourself, badly

Do not search for your business name — you will rank for that regardless. Search the way a customer who has never heard of you would search. “Emergency plumber [your town]”. “Physio near me”. “Commercial cleaning [your county]”.

If you do not appear in the first two pages, the question is not whether your website looks modern. It is whether Google understands what you do and where you do it. That is often a content and structure fix rather than a rebuild.

Check three: put it through PageSpeed Insights

Go to PageSpeed Insights, paste your URL, and read the mobile results.

You are looking for three things Google calls Core Web Vitals:

• Largest Contentful Paint — how long until the main content appears. Under 2.5 seconds is the target.
• Cumulative Layout Shift — how much the page jumps about while loading. Under 0.1.
• Interaction to Next Paint — how quickly it responds when tapped. Under 200 milliseconds.

These feed into search rankings, and more importantly they feed into whether someone on a patchy 4G connection waits. If your site is red on all three, that is a real finding — though even then, the fix is sometimes hosting and images rather than a full rebuild.

Check four: use it on your own phone, on mobile data

Turn wifi off. Load your site. Try to find your prices, then try to contact someone.

Time it. Count the taps.

This sounds trivially obvious and it is the check that most often changes someone’s mind, in both directions. Plenty of sites that look dated on a desktop are perfectly usable on a phone. Plenty of sites that were expensive and look impressive turn out to need four taps and a pinch-zoom to reach a phone number.

Check five: what happens at 9pm?

Land on your own site as a stranger with a question that is not answered anywhere on it. What are your options?

If the answer is a contact form promising a reply within two working days, you have found something — and it is not a design problem. It is that nothing is behind the counter outside working hours, which is a much cheaper thing to fix than a rebuild.

So: rebuild or not?

Fix what you have if the site loads reasonably, works on a phone, and the real problem is that nobody arrives or nobody can reach you. Better content, proper technical SEO and something to handle out-of-hours enquiries will do more than a redesign, for less money.

Rebuild if it is slow in a way that is baked into how it was built, if it genuinely does not work on a phone, if you cannot get changes made without paying someone every time, or if it is on a platform that is no longer maintained and is becoming a security liability.

Move it, don’t rebuild it if the site itself is fine and the hosting is the problem — slow, unreliable, or renewing at four times what you first paid. That is a job measured in hours.

The version of this we would rather you did

Send us the URL. We will do these five checks and reply with two paragraphs telling you what we found, free, with no obligation and no follow-up sequence.

A decent share of the replies we send say some version of “your site is fine, here is the thing that is actually costing you”. Those people mostly do not become clients, and it is still the right reply to send — if only because they tell someone else.

If it turns out a rebuild is the answer, here is what we build and what it costs. If it turns out it is not, you have saved a few thousand pounds by sending an email.