When it’s time to redesign your website: the signs and what to do

A website ages quietly. You see it every day and get used to it, but a customer is seeing it for the first time. Here are the signs that it’s time for an update, ways to check your site yourself, and what to do next.

Seven signs

1. It’s awkward on a phone. The text is tiny, the buttons are hard to tap, and people have to pinch to zoom. This matters for search too: Google uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking (Google Search Central (opens in a new tab)).
2. It’s slow to load. Especially on mobile data, when someone is looking you up on the go.
3. The information is out of date. Old prices, hours, services and photos, and you can’t fix them yourself or don’t know how.
4. The browser says “Not secure”. The site has no secure connection. Chrome warns visitors that someone may be able to see the information they send through it (Chrome Help (opens in a new tab)). Not everyone will leave their phone number in a form like that.
5. The site looks worse than your business. The salon is upscale and cozy, but the site is an old template with someone else’s photos.
6. It’s unclear what to do. There’s no visible button to book or call, the form doesn’t work, or enquiries from it get lost.
7. The site depends on one person. The developer has disappeared, nobody has the logins, and the system and plugins haven’t been updated in ages. If something breaks, there’s no one to fix it.

If you see one sign, a few fixes are often enough. If you see several, it’s worth thinking about a redesign.

How to check it yourself

You can start without any specialists.

• Open the site on your phone and go through it as a customer would: find a service, check the price, book.
• Ask a friend who hasn’t seen the site to find your phone number and hours. Watch where they get stuck.
• Send yourself an enquiry through the site’s form and check whether it arrives, and where.
• Run the site through PageSpeed Insights (opens in a new tab). It’s a free Google tool that shows how fast your site loads on a phone and what’s slowing it down.
• Search for your business name on Google and look at what a customer sees: your site, your Business Profile, your reviews.
• Check who holds the logins for the domain, the hosting and the site itself. If nobody knows, start there: without access, there are no fixes and no redesign.

Fixes or a redesign

Not every old site needs to be rebuilt from scratch. Sometimes a few fixes are enough:

• update the texts, prices and photos;
• fix the form;
• compress heavy images so pages load faster;
• set up a secure connection.

A redesign makes sense when the problems are fundamental: the site doesn’t work on phones, it can’t be edited without a developer, the platform is outdated, and the look doesn’t match the business. Then fixing it piece by piece can take longer and cost more than building it again. Which platform to build on is covered in WordPress, Shopify, Wix or custom code.

The good news: with a redesign, you don’t start from zero. You already have texts, photos, reviews and a sense of what your customers ask about, and all of it can go into the new site.

What a redesign costs

It depends on what changes: just the look, the structure and texts as well, or the whole platform. Moving to a new platform is almost a new site. If the platform and the content stay, there’s less work. That’s why we give a price after the audit, once it’s clear what needs doing. What goes into the price of a website in general is covered in how much a website costs for a small business in Canada.

What to keep in a redesign

• The domain. The address your customers and search engines know doesn’t need to change.
• The addresses of pages people find through search. If they change, set up redirects from the old addresses to the new ones; otherwise visitors from search land on an empty page.
• What works. Texts your customers like, reviews, good photos.
• Access and data. Analytics, your Google Business Profile, email on your domain.

How our redesign works

1. Audit. Free: we look at your site and send you a short list of what’s holding it back.
2. Plan. Together we decide what to rework and what to keep, and we give you a price.
3. Redesign. We rebuild the site and show it to you. You approve it.
4. Launch. The updated site goes live on the same domain.

You can start with step one: leave your site’s address in the form below. After the audit, the choice is yours: fix things yourself, make a few changes, or redesign the site with us.