Websites don’t break loudly. They fade — a little slower, a little more dated, a little further down the search results — while the business they represent keeps growing. Owners usually sense it long before they act on it. Here’s the checklist we use to tell whether a site needs a touch-up or a teardown. Count your yeses.

The customer-facing signs

1. You hesitate to send people there. The clearest signal on this list. If you say “check our Instagram” instead of your own website, you already know.

2. It looks wrong on a phone. Most local search happens on phones. Pinch-zooming, buttons too small to tap, a menu that’s a photo of a PDF — every one of those is a customer deciding you’re harder to deal with than the next result.

3. It loads slowly. Count seconds on your own phone, on cellular, not office Wi-Fi. Past about three seconds, people leave — and Google knows they leave.

4. The information is stale. Old hours, a menu from two summers ago, staff who left, prices you no longer honor. Stale content doesn’t read as “busy owner” to a customer; it reads as “maybe closed.”

5. It doesn’t match what your business has become. You’ve added services, moved upmarket, doubled the team — and the site still describes the business you were three years ago. The gap between how good you are and how good you look is money left on the table.

6. Your competitors’ sites embarrass yours. Search your own category — “med spa southlake,” “roofer keller” — and click your top three competitors. If you’d choose them on websites alone, so will everyone else.

The behind-the-scenes signs

7. You can’t update it. Changes go through a person who takes weeks to respond, or a dashboard you dread. A website you can’t easily change is a website that goes stale (see #4) by design.

8. You don’t show up in local search. If you’re not somewhere on the first page for your category and city — or in the map results — the site likely has structural problems: no local schema, thin content, slow loads, or it was simply never built with search in mind.

9. The contact path leaks. Forms that go to an inbox nobody checks, no click-to-call, booking that requires email tennis. If you don’t know how many inquiries your site produced last month, the answer is probably “fewer than it should have.”

10. It runs on something fragile. A WordPress install nobody updates, plugins nobody remembers installing, hosting renewed on a card nobody can find. The site works until the day it very much doesn’t.

11. You’re paying for things you don’t understand. Monthly charges for “maintenance” or “SEO” with nothing you can point to. Opaque invoices usually mean the value is opaque too.

12. You don’t actually own it. Domain in someone else’s account, site on a platform it can’t leave, content you can’t retrieve. We wrote a whole post on this one — it’s the sign that turns a redesign into a rescue.

Scoring it

1–2 yeses: you need a refresh, not a redesign — update the content, fix the slow images, tighten the contact path. Days of work, not weeks. 3–5 yeses: the site is actively costing you customers; a proper redesign pays for itself, but you can keep your platform if it’s healthy. 6 or more: stop patching. The foundation is the problem, and money spent decorating it is wasted — rebuild on something modern, fast, and yours.

What a rebuild actually involves

Less than the last one did, probably. Our version: $1,000 and 2–6 weeks from kickoff to live — custom design, real copywriting help, local SEO foundations, and the launch logistics (domain, DNS, SSL, analytics) handled. After that it’s $100/month and the staleness problem becomes ours: you text the change, we make it. The checklist above stops being your problem, permanently.

Want a second opinion before deciding? Send us your site through the contact page and we’ll tell you honestly which bucket you’re in — refresh, redesign, or rebuild — and what we’d do first.