5 Signs You Need a New Website

  • By Paul Drake
  • April 8, 2025
  • Blog

Many of your potential clients will use your website to decide if they want to do business with you. Is your site putting them off?

Here are 5 signs that it may be doing just that and that you should consider replacing it.

1. Not mobile friendly

Older websites or those built on a tight budget may not work well on a mobile device. Can you afford for over 50% of your potential customers to go elsewhere because it’s hard to read your website on their phone? I’ll bet you’ve come across websites that don’t display well on your mobile – ones that are much wider than your phone’s screen; have text that’s too small to read, or buttons that are so close together that it’s hard to pick the right one. Think about how it made you feel. Did you carry on regardless, or go straight to the next result of the 36,000 that Google found for you? I think most people would vote with their feet (or fingers!)

If you can’t afford to turn lots of prospects away, and your website doesn’t look great on a mobile device, it’s a sign you may need a new website.

2. Slow To Load

Another bugbear of mine is when a page takes far too long to appear. Unless it’s a page I particularly need to see, I’ll give up quite quickly and go somewhere else. Modern, well-built websites will be created with one eye to performance (like all of ours are). The construction of the page and thoughtful sizing and compression of images can make a massive difference, especially on a mobile device.

The speed of the server where your website is hosted can have a huge impact too. We moved all our clients’ sites to a new hosting platform last year for this very reason and saw 30-40% increases in speed across most of them – and our previous hosting provider wasn’t especially tardy to begin with!

Open your website in private browser mode on a mobile with just a 4G or 5G connection (no Wi-Fi). If it takes more than a few seconds to load the home page, it’s a sign you may need a new website.

3. No Longer Reflects Your Business and/or Branding

We’ve all been there – we get an idea for a new offering or a new direction to move our business in. We get excited and get so caught up in the moment that we don’t have time to update our website. Then the next new shiny thing comes along and before you know it, you find yourself talking to people and saying, “it’s not on my website yet, but will be soon”. But it never is (I know – I’ve been there)!

Or maybe you went through a rebranding exercise a while ago but didn’t budget in a website revamp, and now your site is out of kilter with the rest of your marketing.

In either case, they’re signs that you may need a new website.

4. Your Website Isn’t Even Basically Accessible

Is your website usable by people with disabilities?

The WCAG standards (“Web Content Accessibility Guidelines”) are guidelines created to ensure that anyone, regardless of vision, hearing or mobility can use the internet comfortably. They are quite comprehensive but somewhat complex.

The good news is that if you’re in the UK, unless you’re running a Public Sector website, you don’t currently need your website to meet the full WCAG standards. But you can make your site basically accessible by ensuring that the simplest things are in place – fonts that are big enough and clear enough to read on all devices; high enough contrast between text and its background, and images that have alt-tag text so that screen readers (and Google!) can understand what’s on the image.

Relatively small things like that can help a lot. We bake these into our designs as standard whenever we build client websites. There are lots of free tools out there to check your accessibility – or just ask us and we’ll do it for you (for free).

If your site isn’t even basically accessible, it’s a sign that you may need a new website.

5. Your Competitor’s Website Is Better Than Yours

I don’t mean this as a vanity thing. Check out the competitors that you regularly lose work to. If their website looks more professional, clearer, faster and/or makes their offering look better than yours, this could be why.

It doesn’t matter if you’re better, cheaper or more professional than them. If your website doesn’t communicate this clearly and concisely, your prospect may look at your website then go to your rival instead. Also, if your rival’s site is better optimised so that Google ranks it above yours, your prospect may never even see yours.

If your competitors have better websites than yours, it’s a sign that you may need a new website.

So here you have it. Look at your website with a critical, impartial eye and rate it against these five points. If you find that you’re too close to it, we can do a free mini audit of your site.

Then, if your site shows at least one of these signs, we need to have a chat.