Signs Your Business Website Needs a Redesign or Rebuild
A business website rarely fails all at once. It ages quietly — a phone layout that was fine years ago, a copyright line stuck three years back, an enquiry form nobody has tested since it was built — and the cost turns up as enquiries you never hear about. Here's the diagnostic we'd walk through with a business in Edinburgh that suspects its site is holding it back.
Start with what the site is actually for
Before judging a website, decide what job it's meant to do. For most small firms across the Lothians it's one of three: convince a stranger you're worth ringing, help an existing customer find your number or hours, or take a booking without a phone call. A plain site that does its job beats a beautiful one that doesn't, and every sign below matters only because it gets in the way.
It's awkward on a phone
This costs the most and gets noticed the least, because you probably check your own site on a desktop. Open it on your phone, on mobile data rather than the office wi-fi, and do what a customer would do. Pinching to zoom, a menu that hides behind something, buttons too close together to hit cleanly, sideways scrolling to read a line — none of that is a matter of taste. That's people leaving.
It takes too long to appear
Speed is mostly about the first few seconds; people don't wait for a blank screen. The usual culprits are photographs uploaded straight from a phone at full size, a pile of plugins and tracking scripts each fetching their own files, and hosting that's cheap because it's shared with a lot of other sites. Free page-speed tools will tell you which it is — worth knowing, because oversized images are an afternoon's work, while a slow platform underneath is a rebuild.
A stranger can't tell what you do — or how to reach you
Show your homepage to someone who knows nothing about the business for five seconds, then ask what you sell and where you're based. If they can't say, the words at the top are doing the wrong job. The same test applies to getting in touch: a phone number that isn't tappable on a mobile, or a contact form going to an inbox nobody checks, quietly costs you work. Send yourself a test enquiry today: forms often stop working after an email address changes, and nothing announces it.
Stale content and a missing padlock
- The copyright year gives it away. If the footer shows a year that's long gone, visitors wonder whether you're still trading. So does a news page whose last post is from years back.
- Check for HTTPS. If browsers flag your site as "not secure", that's visible to every visitor and worth fixing first. On most modern hosting it's a setting to switch on, not something to buy.
- Take a backup before anyone touches it. The same 3-2-1 thinking you apply to office files applies here: keep your own copy of the site and its database, not just whatever the host holds.
You can't change a word without ringing someone
If updating your opening hours means emailing a developer and waiting, the site will go stale — not because you don't care, but because the friction is too high for small changes. A site you can edit yourself gets kept current; one you can't, doesn't. Worth checking too: do you control the domain name and hosting account, and does someone in your business still hold those logins? We've seen firms in Livingston and Dalkeith find out only when a supplier relationship ended.
Nobody finds it, nobody's measuring, and it's out of date
- Search yourself honestly. Not by your business name — you'll rank for that regardless — but by what you sell plus your town. If you're nowhere, the site probably lacks the plain pages that answer those searches.
- No analytics means no evidence. Without basic visitor figures, every decision is a guess. If you add tracking, get the cookie and privacy side right — that part is worth proper advice.
- It describes a business you no longer run. New services, new premises, or a shift to the kind of hybrid setup in this remote working guide — if the site still shows the old shape of the business, no amount of design will fix it.
One or two of these and you have a tidy-up job. Five or more — particularly if mobile, speed and editability are all on the list — and you're past patching. Either way, price it as a planned cost alongside the rest of your IT budget, not an emergency.
Designing, hosting and looking after it
This is work we do. From Wishaw we design and host business websites for firms across Edinburgh and the Lothians, keep WordPress sites patched and backed up, and run email hosting on its own or alongside a planned move to Microsoft 365, with the domain, DNS and security around it treated as part of your business IT support. Tell us what the site has to do and you'll get a clear quote before any work.