If your website is slow to load on a phone, doesn't clearly say what you do within a few seconds, is hard to use on mobile, has broken or dead-end contact paths, or hasn't been updated in over a year, it is actively losing you customers — not just failing to help. A website that exists but doesn't do its job is worse than no website at all, because visitors take the experience as a signal about how the business runs. Here's how to check for each of these yourself, in about ten minutes.
1. It's slow, especially on mobile
Open your site on your phone using mobile data, not office wifi. Time how long it takes to actually become usable. If it's more than a couple of seconds, most visitors have already left before they see anything — they don't wait around, and they don't tell you they left.
Check it: Search "PageSpeed Insights," enter your URL, and look at the mobile score specifically — not desktop, since most visitors to a business website are on their phones.
2. A visitor can't tell what you do within a few seconds
Land on your homepage as a stranger would. Without scrolling, can you tell what the business does, who it's for, and what to do next? If the top of the page is a big generic image and a vague tagline with no clear next step, visitors bounce before they read anything else — they're not going to dig for information you could have put in front of them immediately.
Check it: Ask someone unfamiliar with your business to look at your homepage for five seconds, then tell you what you do. If they can't, your visitors can't either.
3. It's hard to use on a phone
This is different from speed — this is about whether buttons are tappable, text is readable without zooming, and forms don't fight you. A site that was designed for a desktop screen and never properly adapted for mobile creates friction at exactly the moment someone was ready to act.
Check it: Try to complete the one thing you most want a visitor to do — book, call, fill a form — entirely on your phone. Note every point where you had to pinch-zoom, mis-tap, or give up.
4. Contact paths are broken or dead-end
A "Contact Us" button that goes nowhere. A phone number that's an image instead of a tappable link. A form that submits but you never actually receive the message because nobody's checked the inbox it goes to in months. Each of these is a customer who did the hard part — deciding to reach out — and then hit a wall you didn't know existed.
Check it: Actually submit your own contact form and confirm the message arrives somewhere you check. Tap every phone number and email link on the site to confirm they work as links, not just text.
5. It clearly hasn't been touched in over a year
An outdated copyright year in the footer, a "Latest News" section frozen from last year, pricing or offers that no longer apply — these tell a visitor the business might not be actively running, even if it very much is. Trust erodes fast when the page in front of someone looks abandoned.
Check it: Look at your site the way a stranger would and ask: does anything here look stale enough to make someone question if this business is still open?
What to do with this list
None of these five are matters of taste — they're checkable, and either your site has the problem or it doesn't. If you found one or two, that's usually a targeted fix, not a full rebuild. If you found most of them, the site may be old enough or built cheaply enough that patching it individually costs more in the long run than starting fresh — a judgment call worth making deliberately rather than by default. Our website cost post covers what a rebuild actually runs.
If you'd rather have someone else run this check, get in touch and we'll tell you plainly what we find — including if the honest answer is "your site's fine, don't spend money on this yet."
FAQ
- How do I know if I need a full rebuild or just fixes?
- If the problems are isolated — a broken form, slow images, outdated content — those are fixable without touching the rest of the site. If the underlying design itself is the problem (not mobile-friendly at all, structurally confusing), patching tends to cost more over time than rebuilding properly once.
- Does a slow website actually affect Google rankings, or just user experience?
- Both. Page speed is a known ranking factor, and it also directly affects whether visitors who do find you stick around long enough to convert.
- My site looks fine to me — how do I know if it's actually a problem for visitors?
- You're the worst judge of your own site, because you already know what you meant to say. Get someone with no context to look at it cold, or watch someone use it without guiding them, and pay attention to where they hesitate.
- Is it worth fixing an old site, or should I just start over?
- Depends on how much of the underlying structure is salvageable versus how much needs to change. This is exactly the kind of call worth getting an outside, non-invested opinion on before committing either way.