When was your website last properly updated?
Not a content tweak. Not a new blog post. A real, ground-up rebuild or major redesign.
If the answer is "more than 3 years ago" or "I genuinely can't remember," your website is probably costing you money every single month — and you might not even realise it.
Here are the 12 most common signs we see at Webgenix when Derby business owners get in touch about a redesign. If 3 or more apply to you, it's almost certainly time.
1. Your site looks dated compared to competitors
Open your website on your phone. Now open three of your competitors' websites. Be honest — does yours look like it belongs in the same era?
Web design has moved fast in the last 5 years. Sites built before 2022 typically have giveaway features that scream "outdated":
- Hero images with text overlaid in unusual places
- Sliders/carousels on the homepage (these have been proven to hurt conversions for years)
- Heavy drop shadows and gradient buttons
- Stock photo people pointing at things
- "Welcome to our website" headlines
If your site has any of these, your customers are unconsciously judging your business as outdated too.
2. Your bounce rate is over 70%
Open Google Analytics (you have it installed, right?). Check your bounce rate — the percentage of visitors who leave without clicking anything else.
Healthy benchmarks:
- E-commerce: 20-45%
- Service businesses: 30-55%
- Blogs: 70-90% (this is normal for blogs)
If your service business has a bounce rate above 70%, something on your site is sending people away within seconds. Could be slow loading, terrible mobile experience, dated design, or unclear messaging.
3. It takes more than 3 seconds to load
Visit pagespeed.web.dev and paste in your homepage URL. Look at the LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) score.
Anything above 2.5 seconds is hurting you. Anything above 4 seconds is actively losing you customers — Google's own research shows 53% of mobile users abandon a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
Slow sites also rank worse on Google. Page speed is a confirmed ranking factor, and the full technical picture matters more than most business owners realise. If your speed score is bad, our Core Web Vitals guide for UK small businesses walks through the specific metrics Google cares about and how to fix them.
4. It's not properly mobile-friendly
Open your website on your phone. Try to:
- Read body text without zooming
- Tap a button without accidentally tapping another button
- Fill in your contact form
- Find your phone number
If any of those are awkward, your site fails the mobile-friendly test. Considering 60-70% of website traffic is now mobile, this is a critical issue.
A site built before 2018 was probably designed primarily for desktop and "made responsive" as an afterthought. A modern site is mobile-first by default.
5. You can't update content yourself
If every text change requires a developer, you have an outdated site. Modern websites — even custom-built ones — should let you update text, images, blog posts, and basic page content yourself through a clear admin panel.
If you're paying £50-£150 every time you want to change a phone number or update your services, your site is costing you ongoing money it shouldn't be.
6. Your site doesn't appear on Google for searches you should rank for
Open an incognito browser window. Search for "[your service] Derby" — for example, "wedding photographer Derby" or "personal trainer Derby."
Are you on the first page? Top 10? Top 20?
If you're nowhere to be found and you've been in business for 2+ years, your website's SEO foundations are probably broken. Common culprits in older sites:
- No structured data (schema markup)
- Missing meta titles and descriptions
- No XML sitemap, or one Google can't find
- Slow load times
- Poor mobile experience
- Thin content on key pages
A redesign with proper SEO from the ground up usually fixes all of this at once. For tradesmen specifically, we've written a complete local SEO guide that covers what a properly-optimised site needs.
7. Your contact form doesn't work properly (or isn't even there)
This sounds basic. We see it constantly.
- Forms that send to an email nobody monitors anymore
- Forms with no spam protection that get 500 spam submissions per day
- Forms that look broken on mobile
- Forms that don't tell the customer their message was received
- Sites with no contact form at all — just an email address customers have to type out
If you've ever wondered "where did that lead come from that I never followed up on?" — your form might be silently failing. A broken form is one of the 47 things checked in our UK small business website launch checklist, which is worth running through even if you're not launching a new site.
8. You don't have HTTPS / SSL
Look at your website URL in the browser. Does it start with https:// (with a padlock icon) or just http://?
If it's HTTP, your site is flagged as "Not Secure" in modern browsers. Customers see big warnings when they visit. Some browsers block forms entirely on insecure sites.
Worse: Google has been actively demoting non-HTTPS sites in search results since 2018.
This is fixable without a full redesign (any decent hosting includes free SSL via Let's Encrypt now), but if your site doesn't have HTTPS in 2026, it's a strong signal that nobody is maintaining it properly.
9. Your site has been hacked or shows malware warnings
If Google has ever shown a "this site may be harmful" warning when visiting your site, or your hosting company has emailed you about malware, you have bigger problems than design.
Hacked WordPress sites are usually the result of:
- Outdated WordPress core, themes, or plugins
- Weak admin passwords
- Lack of security plugins or monitoring
- Bargain-basement hosting — our guide to the best UK web hosts for small businesses covers which hosts are genuinely secure vs the ones that cause these problems
Once a site has been compromised, simply "cleaning it up" rarely solves the underlying vulnerabilities. A proper rebuild on modern, secure foundations is usually the right answer.
10. Your hosting costs more than your phone bill
If you're paying £50+/month for hosting and you're not running a high-traffic e-commerce site, you're being overcharged — usually by an agency that's making margin on resold hosting.
Quality WordPress or Shopify hosting for a typical Derby small business website should cost £5-£25/month. Anything significantly above that suggests either you're being overcharged or your site is so bloated it needs an oversized server.
A redesign is a good moment to audit and right-size all of this.
11. Your site is built on technology that's no longer supported
If your site runs on:
- Flash (officially dead since 2020)
- jQuery 1.x or 2.x (outdated and vulnerable)
- PHP 5.x or 7.0-7.3 (no longer receiving security updates)
- An old WordPress version that won't update because plugins break
- A custom CMS built in 2010 by someone you can no longer reach
- Wix or Squarespace plans you've outgrown
...you have a ticking time bomb. These platforms either no longer work in modern browsers, can't be properly secured, or trap you with limitations.
12. You're embarrassed to share your website URL
This is the most honest test. When a potential customer asks for your website, do you:
- (A) Send them the URL with confidence, knowing it'll impress them
- (B) Send the URL with a slight cringe, wishing it was better
- (C) Try to send them a Facebook page or Instagram instead because the website is so bad
If you answered B or C, your website is actively harming your brand. The worst possible scenario is having a website that's worse than no website at all — because it actively damages trust at the moment you most need to build it.
What to do next
If you ticked off 3 or more of the above, your next step depends on how serious things are.
1-2 signs: A website refresh might be enough. New design, performance optimisation, content refresh — but keep the underlying platform.
3-5 signs: Time for a full redesign. Same domain, same content where possible, but rebuild the site properly on modern foundations.
6+ signs: Complete rebuild. Treat the existing site as a write-off, plan a fresh start, and migrate only the genuinely valuable content over with proper 301 redirects.
Also check your legal compliance
One issue that forces more redesigns than most business owners realise: GDPR compliance. Older websites typically have pre-compliance cookie banners, forms that silently add people to mailing lists, and privacy policies that don't meet UK GDPR requirements. If your site is 3+ years old, you almost certainly have compliance issues — our GDPR compliance guide for UK business websites covers what you actually need.
How to plan a redesign without losing your Google rankings
The biggest fear most Derby business owners have about redesigning is losing their existing search rankings. This is a legitimate worry — done wrong, a redesign can wipe out years of SEO work.
Done properly, a redesign typically improves rankings. The key things any decent agency will do:
- Audit your existing high-traffic pages before the redesign begins
- Map every old URL to its new equivalent with 301 redirects
- Preserve your meta titles and descriptions for ranking pages
- Migrate (don't recreate) high-performing content
- Update Google Search Console when the new site launches
- Monitor rankings for 90 days post-launch and fix any drops
If an agency you're considering can't talk you through this process clearly, find another agency.
What a good Derby redesign should cost
For most Derby small businesses, a quality website redesign costs:
- Simple service business (5-10 pages): £1,800-£3,500
- Established business with blog and case studies (15-25 pages): £3,500-£6,500
- E-commerce migration and redesign: £4,500-£12,000
- Custom platform / web app rebuild: £6,500-£25,000+
These prices typically include design, development, content migration, SEO preservation, hosting setup, and 30 days of post-launch support.
If you're being quoted significantly less, ask hard questions about what's actually included. A "£500 redesign" almost certainly means a Wix template with your logo dropped in.
If you're being quoted significantly more (£20,000+) for a typical small business site, you're paying agency overheads, not better quality.
For more detail, read our honest web design pricing guide for Derby businesses, or get an instant ballpark with our website cost calculator.
Need an honest opinion on whether you need a redesign?
Webgenix offers a free 30-minute website review for Derby businesses considering a redesign. We'll look at your current site, identify the specific issues holding it back, and give you an honest opinion on whether a redesign is worth it — including telling you if you DON'T need one.
Book your free review → or request a written quote.
Learn more:
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!