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 few seconds to appear, a good share of them leave 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: the words a stranger would type, not your business name. If you're not there, people who don't already know you can't find the site. Getting found comes from proper structure, fast pages, and content that answers the questions customers ask.
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. For most visitors, the design is the first evidence they have of how you run your business.
4. You get traffic but no enquiries
This one is the hardest to spot: people arrive and leave without doing anything. The cause is usually structure: no clear next step, too many choices, buried contact details, or copy that talks about you instead of helping them. A visit only counts if it turns into a call, a booking or an order.
5. Something is broken
Dead links, forms that go nowhere, a checkout button that doesn't work. It happens more often than owners realise. 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 have the logins, you don't fully own the site. You should hold your domain, your code, your content and your access.
7. It no longer matches your business
Businesses change and websites tend to stay put. New services aren't listed, old prices are still up, the photos are years old. When the site describes the business you were three years ago, every visitor meets an older, weaker version of it.
Score your site in 60 seconds
Ten quick yes-or-nos built from the seven signs above. Nobody sees your answers but you. Every "yes" is a point in your site's favour.
- Does it load in under three seconds on a phone?
- Does it look current next to your top competitor's site?
- Can a stranger tell what you do within five seconds of landing?
- Does Google find you when you search your own business name?
- Can people reach you in one tap, with a visible phone number, email or form?
- Do enquiries come in through the site?
- Does every link, form and button work?
- Can you update it yourself, or get updates within days?
- Does it still match what your business offers today?
- Do you own the domain, hosting, and content outright?
Reading your score, every "yes" is a point.
- 9–10: In good shape. A full redesign would be money wasted. Keep your site, maintain it, and spend the budget elsewhere.
- 6–8: Solid bones, real gaps. You likely don't need a ground-up rebuild. Fixing the "no" answers one by one would go a long way.
- 3–5: Your site is working against you more than for you. Patching the "no" list one item at a time usually costs more than a redesign, and a redesign would likely pay for itself.
- 0–2: It's likely costing you customers every week it stays up. Rebuild it.
A note on the verdicts: a site that scores 9 or 10 doesn't need a redesign, and the verdict says so.
What a proper redesign fixes
A proper redesign keeps what works (your domain, your Google history, the brand people already recognise) and rebuilds what doesn't: speed engineered in from the start, structure built around the action you want visitors to take, copy that answers customers' questions, 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 for a redesign that call does a lot of work: you'll hear 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.
Before you sign with anyone, ask them these ten questions.