Seven signs it’s time to update your website.

Google uses the mobile version of a site’s content, crawled with its smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking. Google Search Central: mobile-first indexing. Since October 2023, every site that works on mobile devices is crawled primarily with the mobile crawler. Google Search Central blog.

Underneath, a page needs a viewport meta tag to fit a phone screen; without it, the page loads zoomed out and the text is hard to read. web.dev: responsive design basics.

Google’s Core Web Vitals call a page good when its largest content appears within 2.5 seconds (LCP), it responds to a tap within 200 milliseconds (INP), and its layout shifts by less than 0.1 (CLS), measured at the 75th percentile of visits. web.dev: Web Vitals. INP replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital on March 12, 2024. web.dev.

Chrome has marked every HTTP page as “not secure” since Chrome 68, released in July 2018. Chromium blog. Google has also announced that Chrome 154, planned for October 2026, will turn on “Always Use Secure Connections” by default. Google blog: HTTPS by default.

Google Business Profile asks businesses to provide their regular customer-facing hours. Google Business Profile guidelines. Google also says that businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local search results. Google Business Profile Help. A website that disagrees with your profile sends customers to a closed door.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2) set a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. W3C: WCAG 2.2, contrast (minimum). Light grey text on white, or text laid over a busy photograph, can fall below it.

If changing a price means emailing someone who no longer answers, or nobody knows where the site is hosted or who holds the domain login, the site is out of date even if it looks fine today.

Most visitors arrive with one job: call, book, order, ask for a quote, or find the address. On a phone, that action belongs on the first screen, not three swipes down.

Start with the problem, not the age of the site. Wrong hours, an expired security certificate or a missing phone link may need a small repair. Have the owner and current website provider review phone layouts and page content before deciding on a rebuild. If the existing structure still supports the business, repair the affected parts. Consider a redesign when that review shows that the layouts or page structure no longer serve the business.

If you redesign, keep the page addresses that already get visits and redirect the rest; Google recommends mapping old URLs to new ones and using permanent redirects. Google Search Central: site moves. Our redesign checklist covers what to prepare, and how much a redesign costs covers pricing.

There is no fixed schedule. Redesign when the site fails the checks above, or when the business itself has changed: new services, a new location, new prices or a new name.

Often, yes. Updating hours, fixing a security certificate or making a phone link easier to find may be enough. A problem on a phone does not automatically mean the whole site needs rebuilding. Let the owner and current provider check the affected pages, then choose a repair or a redesign based on what needs to change.

It does not have to. Keep the page addresses that already get visits, send any that change to their new pages with permanent redirects, and keep your business details accurate.