How can you tell if your website is outdated?

Why does a website age without you noticing?

You know your website by heart, and you look at it on your office computer. Your customers discover it on their phone, between two appointments, without knowing anything about you. In Belgium, nine out of ten people aged 16 to 74 go online with their phone. When something gets in their way, they go back and call the next business, without telling you.

The seven checks to do in ten minutes

Take your phone and switch off the Wi-Fi, to put yourself in the place of a customer who is looking for you from the street.

1. Does the site load quickly?

Open your home page and count. Google recommends that the main element of a page appear within the first 2.5 seconds. If you have time to wonder what is happening, your visitors are wondering too.

2. Can you read it without zooming in?

If you have to spread your fingers to read a text or to tap a link, the site was not designed for phones. Google writes that it uses the phone version of a site to store and rank it. A page that is hard to read on a small screen therefore starts at a disadvantage.

3. Can people find how to reach you in five seconds?

Look for your phone number or a contact button without scrolling down the page. A number written inside an image, which nobody can tap to call, counts as missing.

4. Does the address bar show a warning?

Look to the left of the site’s address. If the browser shows “Not secure”, your site does not use the protected connection, called HTTPS, which has become the standard. Since version 154, released on 22 September 2026, Chrome asks visitors for their permission by default before opening a public site that does not use it.

5. Can people find you on Google without typing your name?

Open a private browsing window and type your trade followed by your municipality, for example “heating engineer Etterbeek”. Look at the map and at the first page. If you do not appear there, the people who do not know you yet will not find you.

6. Does the site describe your business as it is today?

Read your home page again as if you were seeing it for the first time. Check the services, the opening hours, the photos and the year shown at the bottom of the page. A service you no longer offer or a photo from ten years ago makes people doubt the rest.

7. Can you change a sentence yourself?

Try to correct your opening hours. If you no longer know how to do it, or if the person who looked after it no longer replies, your website is frozen, and every change in your business will make it a little less accurate.

Two free Google tools to go further

PageSpeed Insights measures the speed of your website on a phone and on a computer. You paste in the site’s address, and the tool also shows what is slowing the page down.

Google Search Console shows which searches your website appears in, and whether Google runs into problems reading it. To access it, you first have to prove that the site belongs to you.

How many signs should make you worry?

One or two signs can be fixed without redoing everything. A slow site can be made lighter, and a phone number can be put back at the top of the page.

From three signs onwards, the fixes often cost as much as a redesign, because the problems come from the way the site was built. This is the case for a site that was never designed for phones, or that nobody can edit any more.

Do you have to throw everything away when you redo a website?

No. An old website has value, and a well-run redesign keeps it. Your domain name, the texts that already bring in visitors, your reviews and the place you have earned on Google are all kept. The redesign changes the speed, how the site reads on a phone, the clarity of the message and how easy it is to contact you.