Do You Need a New Website?

A site is not bad because it is old, because a competitor’s looks fancier or because a vendor says it is out of date. A plain site that loads fast, ranks, and produces leads is doing its job.

The right question is not “is it modern?” It is “is it working, and what does it cost to keep it that way?”

• Does it produce leads? Count the forms and calls that came from the site last quarter. If you cannot tell, that is a problem to fix first, since you are flying blind.
• Is it fast on a phone? Open it on your phone on mobile data. If it takes several seconds to show anything useful, visitors are leaving. You can also run Google’s free PageSpeed Insights test for a score.
• Can you change it? Try updating a phone number or a price. If it takes days or costs a fee, the site is slowing the business down.
• What does upkeep cost? Add up hosting, plugin licenses, security fixes and developer time over the past year. A site that needs constant patching costs more than its invoice suggests.
• Do you control it? Domain, hosting, logins and files. If you do not, see our guide on who owns your website.

• Leave it. It produces leads, loads quickly, you can update it and upkeep is low. Spend the money on getting more people to it.
• Fix it. The structure is fine, but a few things are broken: a slow page, a dead form, outdated content. A targeted repair is usually cheaper than a rebuild.
• Rebuild it. It is slow on phones, hard to change, expensive to keep patched or controlled by someone else, and fixes would cost nearly as much as starting over.

We build custom sites, so we have an interest here. That is why we put “leave it” first. If your site passes these checks, you should keep it.

• What the site must do. Get calls, book jobs, collect quotes. Write down the one or two jobs it has.
• What to keep. Page addresses that already earn search traffic, good content and your branding. Changing addresses without redirects can lose traffic.
• Who runs it after launch. Hosting, updates and changes. A site with no owner decays.
• What it connects to. Your CRM, phone system and forms. The build should send leads where your team already works.

If you cannot tell which of the three results you are in, an outside review of the site and the systems behind it will usually settle it quickly.