Your website is five years old. Here is how to tell if it is hurting you.

An old website is not automatically a bad website. Some sites built in 2018 still work fine. The problem is that owners rarely look at their own site, so nobody notices when it slides from dated to actively damaging. Here is how to check in about five minutes.

Open it on your phone right now

Not your computer. Your phone. If you have to pinch and zoom to read anything, if the menu does not open, if a button is too small to tap with a thumb, you have found your answer. Most of the people looking you up are on a phone. If it is awkward there, it is failing where it counts.

Check whether it says https

Look at the address bar. If it says Not secure, browsers are actively warning visitors away from your site, and Google is ranking you lower for it. This one is usually a cheap fix and it is urgent.

Time how long it takes to load

Count it out. More than four seconds and a real share of people are gone before they see anything. Old sites get slow because of oversized images and plugins nobody has updated since the site was built.

Look for anything that is factually wrong

Old hours. A phone number you no longer use. A staff member who left in 2021. A price you have raised twice since. Every wrong detail is a small argument that you do not pay attention, and the customer applies that to your actual work.

Try to find the way to become a customer

Pretend you are a stranger who wants to hire you. How many clicks to the phone number? Is there a form? Does the form actually send anywhere? Test it. Send yourself a message and see if it arrives. Broken contact forms are far more common than anyone realizes, and you would never know. The inquiries just stop.

Ask whether you can change it yourself

If you cannot update your own hours without calling somebody who no longer answers, the site is a liability regardless of how it looks.

Repair or rebuild

If it loads fast, works on a phone, and only the content is stale, fix the content. That is a repair. If it is slow, awkward on a phone, built on something nobody maintains, and you cannot get into it, rebuilding is cheaper than untangling it. Patching a site built on abandoned software costs more in hours than starting clean.

An easy way to find out

Send me your current site and I will rebuild it and send you the new version in 24 hours. Then you can look at them side by side and decide. Costs nothing.