15 signs your website needs a redesign

Nothing crashes. No one complains. Leads simply arrive less often than they used to, and it is easy to blame the market rather than the page a customer met first. Work through this list with your phone in your hand. Any three of these is a redesign conversation.

1. It was never designed for a phone

If you pinch to read body text, or a menu covers the screen with no way to close it, you are asking most of your visitors to work. On a typical U.S. small-business site, 60 to 75 percent of sessions now come from a phone.

2. The homepage takes more than three seconds

Test on cellular data, not office wifi. Google found that as load time goes from one to three seconds, bounce probability rises 32 percent. Speed is the first filter a visitor applies, before they read a single word.

3. Nobody has submitted the form in months

Send yourself a test enquiry from a phone, on mobile data, in a browser you never use. Broken forms are the most common failure we find in audits, and they fail silently: the visitor sees a spinner, you see nothing.

4. You cannot update it yourself

If adding a service, a price or a photo means emailing a developer and waiting a week, the site will fall behind the business. It always does.

5. It does not say what makes you different

Cover your logo. If the homepage copy could belong to any competitor in your city, a prospect comparing three quotes has no reason to choose you.

6. Organic traffic has been flat or falling for a year

Open Search Console and compare the last twelve months to the twelve before. A steady decline usually points at something structural: thin pages, missing service pages, or Core Web Vitals failures.

7. You are invisible in the map pack

Search your main service plus your city in an incognito window. If you are not in the three-result map block, you are missing the highest-intent traffic in local search.

8. There is no service page for what you actually sell

A single "Services" page listing nine things ranks for none of them. Each service that matters commercially needs its own page with real depth.

9. No reviews, licenses or proof anywhere

American buyers check for trust signals before they call: reviews, license numbers, insurance, warranties, real photos of real work. Their absence reads as risk.

10. The design has visible date stamps

Gradient buttons, stock handshakes, carousels nobody clicks, a copyright year from 2016. Visitors cannot articulate what is wrong, but they register that the company may not be current either.

11. It fails basic accessibility

Try navigating with only the Tab key. If you cannot reach the phone number or see where focus is, screen reader users cannot use your site at all - and in the U.S. that is also an ADA exposure worth taking seriously.

12. The content is written about you, not for them

Pages that open with company history rather than the problem the visitor came to solve lose people in the first screen.

13. Photos are generic stock

One afternoon of real photography - your crew, your trucks, your finished work, your dining room - outperforms an entire library of stock imagery.

14. There is no clear next step

Every page should have one obvious action: call, book, request a quote. If a visitor has to scroll back up to find out how to contact you, most will not.

15. You are embarrassed to send the link

This one is unscientific and completely reliable. If you hesitate before giving out your own web address, the redesign decision has already been made.

Every item on this list is measurable. None of them are matters of taste - which is why they are worth fixing.