1. It's slow on a phone
Most of your visitors are on a phone, often on cellular. If your site takes more than a breath to appear, a real portion of them are gone before they see anything. Test it yourself: open your site on your phone with Wi-Fi off. If you wouldn't wait, neither will they.
2. You can't find yourself on Google
Search for what you sell — not your business name, but the thing a stranger would type. If you're not there, the site isn't findable, and a site nobody finds is a brochure in a locked drawer. Findability is built, not wished for: proper structure, fast pages, and content that answers real questions.
3. It looks dated next to your competitors
Visitors judge credibility in seconds, and they judge it visually. If a competitor's site looks like it was built this decade and yours doesn't, you lose trust before a word is read — even if your product is better. Design isn't decoration; it's the first proof of how you run your business.
4. You get traffic but no enquiries
This is the quietest failure of all: people are arriving and leaving without acting. Usually the culprit is structure — no clear next step, too many choices, buried contact details, or copy that describes you instead of helping them. A site's job isn't to be visited. It's to convert a visit into a conversation.
5. Something is actually broken
Dead links, forms that go nowhere, a checkout button that doesn't work. It happens more often than anyone admits — one of the first things I found on a client's store was a cart page whose checkout button did nothing at all. Every day a defect like that lives, it turns away customers who were ready to pay. Here's that story, and what fixing it looked like.
6. You can't update it yourself
If changing a phone number or adding a page means waiting on someone who's hard to reach — or you don't even have the logins — the site isn't really yours. Ownership matters: your domain, your code, your content, your access. Anything less is renting.
7. It no longer matches your business
Businesses evolve; websites calcify. New services aren't listed, old prices linger, the photos are from another era. When the site describes who you were instead of who you are, every visitor gets a worse version of your business than the real one.
Score your site in 60 seconds
Ten quick yes-or-nos — the seven signs above, turned into a checklist. Answer honestly; nobody sees this but you. Every "yes" is a point in your site's favour.
01Does it load in under three seconds on a phone?
02Does it look current next to your top competitor's site?
03Can a stranger tell what you do within five seconds of landing?
04Does Google find you when you search your own business name?
05Is contacting you a one-tap job — visible phone, email, or form?
06Do enquiries actually come in through the site?
07Does everything work — every link, form, and button?
08Can you update it yourself, or get updates within days?
09Does it still match what your business offers today?
10Do you own the domain, hosting, and content outright?
A note on the verdicts: they're calibrated to be honest, not to sell. A site that scores well genuinely doesn't need us.
What a proper redesign actually fixes
A real redesign isn't a fresh coat of paint. Done properly, it keeps what works — your domain, your Google history, your brand equity — and rebuilds what doesn't: speed engineered in from the start, structure built around the action you want visitors to take, copy that speaks to customers instead of at them, and full ownership handed to you at the end.
It's also less disruptive than most owners fear: the new site is built on a private preview link while your current one keeps running, and nothing switches until everything is ready.
How to start — without committing to anything
Every JMD project begins with a free 20-minute call, and redesigns are where that call earns its keep: you'll get an honest read on what your current site does well and where it's losing people — even if the answer is "your site is fine, keep it." If a rebuild does make sense, you'll have a fixed, itemized quote within days.
Already gathering quotes for a redesign? Share any certified written quote along with what you want built, and once we've reviewed it, JMD guarantees your price comes in below it — same scope, nothing trimmed.
Curious what a rebuild costs? The Vancouver pricing guide breaks down the real ranges — and includes a 30-second ballpark estimator. And before you sign with anyone, ask them these ten questions.