Most business owners look at their own website only occasionally, on a fast office connection, already knowing what they're looking for. Your customers don't. They arrive on a phone, in a hurry, comparing you with three other tabs. This checklist helps you see your site the way they do, and work out what to do about it.

Go through each section and count how many points apply. There's a guide to what your score means at the end.

Speed

  • Pages take more than a moment to appear on a phone over mobile data
  • Images load slowly, or jump around as the page loads
  • You've been told your site "needs a faster host" more than once

Why it matters: people are impatient online, and a slow page is often the last page they see. Speed also feeds into how Google judges a page. Test on your own phone, away from the office Wi-Fi.

Phones

  • You have to pinch and zoom to read text
  • Buttons and links are fiddly to tap
  • The menu doesn't open properly, or text runs off the edge

Why it matters: most local searches happen on phones, so this is now the main way people meet your business. A site designed for desktop and squeezed down rarely works well.

Clarity

  • A first-time visitor couldn't tell what you do, who for and where within five seconds
  • Your phone number or contact link is hard to find
  • The home page leads with a vague slogan or a wall of text

Why it matters: visitors won't work hard to understand you. Lead with a clear headline, put your main call to action where it can be seen, and make contact details easy to find on every page.

Search

  • You don't appear when you search for your service plus your town
  • Several pages share the same title, or have no description
  • Every service is crammed onto one page

Why it matters: if people can't find you, nothing else on this list matters. Each main service needs its own page with a unique title, and your site should say clearly where you work. Our plain-English guide to local SEO explains how.

Trust

  • The design looks noticeably dated
  • The copyright year, prices or team details are out of date
  • There are broken links, missing images or placeholder text
  • The browser shows a "Not secure" warning

Why it matters: fair or not, people judge a business by its website. A tired site suggests a tired business, even when the opposite is true. A "Not secure" warning (no SSL certificate) puts many visitors off completely.

Enquiries

  • Your contact form has stopped working, or you're not sure it works
  • Enquiries from the website have dried up, but business hasn't
  • You have no idea how many people visit, or where they come from

Why it matters: your website should be your best salesperson. If you can't measure what it's doing, you can't improve it. Send yourself a test enquiry today.

Day-to-day running

  • Changing a price or a photo means calling a developer
  • The person who built the site has moved on and no one else understands it
  • Updates and backups haven't been done in months, or you don't know

Why it matters: a site you can't update goes stale, and one nobody maintains becomes a security risk. Both get more expensive the longer they're left.

What your score means

  • 0 to 3: your site is in decent shape. Fix the specific points you ticked, and keep it up to date.
  • 4 to 8: a refresh may be enough: improving speed, rewriting key pages, fixing search basics and adding tracking. Talk to whoever looks after your site.
  • 9 or more: a full redesign is probably the better investment. Patching a site with this many problems usually costs more over time than rebuilding it properly.

How to redesign without losing what's working

A redesign done carelessly can lose you search traffic you've spent years earning. Before you start, make sure whoever builds it will:

  • Check which pages currently get visits and which searches you appear for
  • Keep the content that's working, and improve rather than delete it
  • Redirect every important old web address to its new page (a permanent 301 redirect)
  • Keep your domain name, and leave your email untouched
  • Give every new page a unique title and description
  • Submit the new sitemap to Google Search Console and monitor it after launch

Ready for a fresh start?

Our website redesign service covers every point above, with a bespoke, mobile-first design and the same published prices as a new site. We work with businesses across Scotland, including web design in Glasgow and Edinburgh. If you ticked more than a few boxes, start a project and we'll take an honest look at your current site.