Does my website need updating? Seven honest signs

Websites don't come with warning lights. They work on launch day and then sit there, and most owners have no idea whether theirs is quietly fine or quietly costing them customers. Here are seven signs you can check yourself, honestly, today.

The seven signs

1. It was built more than three or four years ago and hasn't been checked since

Not because old is bad, but because the rules around it changed. Google now ranks on speed and mobile experience. Browsers warn about insecure pages. A site nobody has re-checked is running on assumptions from the year it launched.

2. It's awkward on your own phone

Open your site on your phone, honestly, as if you were a stranger. Tiny text? Pinching to zoom? Buttons you miss on the first tap? Around two in three of your visitors are having that exact experience.

3. There's no padlock in the address bar

If browsers show "not secure" next to your address, visitors see it too. It's one of the fastest trust-killers there is, and usually one of the cheapest things to fix.

4. It loads slowly on mobile data

Try it away from your own wifi. Google's research found most mobile visitors abandon pages that take more than three seconds. Your patience with your own site doesn't count.

5. Searching your business name brings up the wrong things

If your own name pulls up an old address, a dead social page, or a competitor before your site, Google is struggling to connect you to your business.

6. The content is visibly stale

An events page from two years ago. A "new" product from 2023. Staleness tells visitors nobody's home, and it tells Google the same.

7. You have no idea how it's doing

No numbers on visitors, no sense of where enquiries come from. Not knowing isn't neutral. It usually means nothing has been looked at in a long time.

Scoring at home

One or two signs: normal, most sites have something. Four or more: your site is probably working against you somewhere, and it's worth finding out where.

The finding-out part is the easy bit. A free SiteMOT tests your live site in about a minute and gives you clear pass, advisory and fail verdicts across six areas. If everything passes, you can stop wondering. If it doesn't, you'll know exactly what needs attention, and you can fix it in your own time or hand the list to someone who does it for a living. Either way, you'll have answers instead of a feeling.