Five signs it is time for a new website

It is time to replace your website when it starts costing you customers — not when you stop liking the look of it. The five most common signs: you have to pinch-zoom on a phone, it loads slowly, you cannot change your own opening hours, you do not show up in search for what you actually do, and the details on it are out of date. If three of those five sound familiar, a new site is usually cheaper and faster than repairing the old one.

A design that has "aged" is the smallest of these problems. Nobody leaves because the colours look like 2018. They leave because they could not find your phone number on a phone.

The five signs

• You have to pinch-zoom on a phone. Tiny text, buttons sitting on top of each other, the page sliding left and right. Most visitors arrive on a phone. If it does not work there, it does not matter how it looks on a laptop.
• It loads slowly. You recognise it by the white screen that lasts too long and by images that jump into place while you are reading. Google measures this as Core Web Vitals; a visitor measures it by tapping back to the search results.
• You cannot change your own opening hours. If every edit goes through someone else and takes three days, the site stops being updated. After a year it is no longer your website, it is an archive.
• You do not show up in search for what you do. Open a private window and search for your service and your town. If half the town appears and you are not even on page two, the site technically exists but is not doing its job.
• The details are out of date. An old phone number, services you no longer offer, a gallery from last year. A site that lists the wrong opening hours does more damage than no site at all.

Repair or replace

A repair makes sense when the skeleton is sound: the page structure is logical, the content is good, you have access to the code and the hosting, and the problem sits in one layer — speed, the mobile layout, or missing technical SEO. That is a few days of work.

A new site is usually the cheaper option when the old one was built on a bought template, when nobody knows where the code lives, when the theme and its plugins have gone years without updates, or when it is being patched for the third time in two years. Each of those means you are paying to fix something that will break again.

I build sites in Next.js, with no template and no plugins that break on update. A new marketing site starts at 800 KM, and that price already includes the mobile layout, the loading speed and the technical SEO — the three reasons old sites get replaced in the first place. Here is exactly what the build covers.

What carries over and what does not

A new site does not mean starting from zero:

• The domain stays. It is your address and it carries the history Google has already recorded. What changes is what sits on it.
• Text and photos carry over. Whatever still works moves across; whatever is out of date gets rewritten.
• Individual page addresses get redirected. If URLs change, the old ones have to point at the new ones. Without that you lose what Google has already indexed, and anyone clicking an old link gets an error.
• Your Google Business profile stays as it is. Only the link inside it changes.

Those four things are the difference between a new website and a fresh start. They get agreed before anything goes live.

What next

If three of the five signs sound familiar, send me your website address through the contact form. I will look at it for free and tell you one of two things: "this can be fixed in a few days" or "this is not worth fixing, and here is why". I reply the same day.

Frequently asked

Can a new site go live without the old one going down? Yes. The new one is built in parallel on a temporary address and switched over only once it is finished and checked. In practice the gap is a few minutes.

What if I do not know who has access to my domain? That gets sorted first, before anything else. The domain has to be registered in your name or your company's name. I will help with the transfer if needed — but until the domain is yours, it is not wise to invest in the site standing on it.