7 Signs Your Small Business Website Needs a Redesign

Before the list, the thing most of these articles won't say: a redesign is the most expensive answer to almost every problem on it. Six of the seven signs below have a cheaper fix that works, and it's worth trying that first.

So each sign comes with two verdicts — what a fix looks like, and what would genuinely push it over into rebuild territory.

1. It's painful on a phone

Not "it technically loads". Pinching to read, buttons you miss with a thumb, a menu that covers the thing you were reading, a phone number you can't tap to call. Most of your visitors are on a phone, often one-handed, often outdoors.

Test it properly: open your own site on your own phone and try to do the thing a customer would do — find your price, find your hours, contact you. Time it. If it takes more than about twenty seconds, that's the problem.

• Fix: bigger tap targets, a tappable phone number, a shorter form, a menu that closes. Often a day's work.
• Rebuild: the layout has no mobile version at all, or it's built on something that can't produce one.

2. It's out of date in a way customers can see

Last year's prices. A team member who left in 2023. "Christmas opening hours" in July. A copyright year that stopped. These read as "this business might not exist any more", which is a much worse message than "this business has an old-looking website".

• Fix: update the content. Free, and the highest-value hour available to you today.
• Rebuild: you can't update it — see sign 5.

an old design says "established". old information says "closed".

3. A visitor can't tell what you do

This is the big one and it's almost never about design. Load your homepage and read only what's visible before you scroll. Does it say what you sell, who you sell it to, and where you are?

A startling number of small-business homepages open with "Welcome to our website" and a photograph of a building. Someone who arrived from a search has a specific problem and about four seconds of patience. If the first thing they read is a greeting rather than an answer, they leave — and your analytics will record that as a traffic problem when it's a sentence problem.

The test: show your homepage to someone who doesn't know your business, for five seconds, then ask them what you do. Their answer is your homepage's real content.

• Fix: rewrite one headline and one paragraph. Costs nothing and routinely does more than a redesign.
• Rebuild: rarely the answer here.

4. There's no obvious next step

Every page should have one thing it wants you to do. Look at your pages and find it. Common failures: a contact form four clicks deep, a phone number only in the footer, three competing buttons of equal weight, or a page that simply ends.

Related, and worth checking on a phone specifically: is there any way to contact you without scrolling? On a lot of sites the answer is no, and the owner has never noticed because they never scroll their own homepage.

• Fix: add the call to action. One per page, visible, saying what happens next.
• Rebuild: the template won't let you put a button where it needs to be.

5. You can't change anything yourself

If updating a price means emailing someone and waiting three days, or logging into something you're frightened of breaking, then updates stop happening. Not immediately — gradually, and then the site is two years stale and you're back at sign 2.

This is the sign I take most seriously, because it's the one that guarantees the others come back. A site you can't maintain isn't a site, it's a liability with a login.

• Fix: get shown how. One training session on the bits you actually change is often all it is — my Business package includes exactly that, for this reason.
• Rebuild: the site was hand-built by someone who has gone, or it's on a platform nobody can get into.

6. Something is quietly broken

The worst failure mode in small-business websites: a contact form that shows the visitor a thank-you page and sends the message nowhere. It's been doing that for nine months. Nobody complains, because from the outside it looks like it worked.

Check all of these today, from a phone, not logged in:

• Submit your own contact form and confirm the email actually arrives
• Check the address it arrives at is one you still read
• Click every navigation link and look for a 404
• Confirm the padlock is there — no security warning
• Try the site on someone else's phone, on mobile data
• Check your maps pin actually points at your premises

• Fix: repair the form, the link, the certificate. Cheap, and urgent.
• Rebuild: things break repeatedly because the underlying thing is unmaintained.

7. It's slow

Slow is usually a few enormous photographs uploaded straight off a phone camera. A single 6MB image can be most of your load time, and it's the most fixable problem on this list.

• Fix: resize and compress the images. Sometimes literally a morning.
• Rebuild: it's slow with no images, which means it's the platform or the plugins.

So when is it genuinely a redesign?

When the fixes don't hold, or when the problem is the foundation rather than the paint. In practice, one of these:

1. 01There's no mobile layout at all, and there can't be one.
2. 02You can't edit it, and nobody who can still works with you.
3. 03The business has changed. You sell something different to someone different, and the site describes a company that no longer exists. Rewriting every page is a rebuild whether or not the design changes.
4. 04You need it to do something new — bookings, accounts, payments, records. That's not a redesign, it's a software project, and it's worth knowing that before you commission it as a website.
5. 05It's held together with things nobody dares touch, and every change carries a risk of taking the site down.

One more thing, before you spend

"Leads are down" is the reason most redesigns get commissioned, and it's the weakest one, because a website is only one of about six things that could have caused it. Your competitor started advertising. Your Google listing lost a category. The season changed. A referral partner retired.

Before you pay for a new site, find out whether people are arriving and leaving, or not arriving at all. Those are opposite problems: one is your website, the other is everything except your website. Analytics set up properly tells you which within a fortnight, and is a great deal cheaper than guessing.