Is It Time to Redesign Your Website? A Self-Assessment Checklist for UK Business Owners

Four quick checks: speed, phones, enquiries and out-of-date content

Each check below ends with a score of 0, 1 or 2 for how worried you should be. Keep a note of the results, because they feed into the readiness test further down. Do the checks on a normal working day, using real figures rather than gut feel. Most owners are surprised by at least one result.

Check 1: Is your site fast enough?

Open Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool and test your homepage, then your most important service page, then one other page. Always read the Mobile tab first. Most people reach small business sites on a phone, and Google judges the mobile version first.

Ignore the big coloured score for a moment and look at three numbers, known as Core Web Vitals:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long until the main image or headline appears. Google wants this under 2.5 seconds. Over 4 seconds is poor.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page reacts when someone taps a button or menu. Under 200 milliseconds is good.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the page jumps around while loading. Under 0.1 is good. If you have ever tapped a link and hit an advert or button that moved at the last moment, you have felt a bad CLS.

At the top of the report you may see a section called "Discover what your real users are experiencing". That is field data from real visitors over the last 28 days, and it matters more than the lab test underneath it. Small sites sometimes do not have enough traffic to show it. If so, use the lab results and test at two different times of day, because shared hosting can be much slower in the evening.

Here is a typical example. A plumber's homepage scored 31 on mobile, with an LCP of 6.1 seconds. The cause was a 4.2MB hero photo uploaded straight from a phone. Once it was resized and saved as a 180KB WebP file, LCP dropped to 2.4 seconds and the score rose past 70. That fix took an hour and needed no redesign. Check for this kind of simple cause before you assume the whole site is the problem.

It points to a deeper problem when the site is still slow after images are sorted. Common causes are a heavy theme that loads scripts for features you do not use, 25 or more plugins, a page builder that wraps every element in layers of code, or cheap hosting that takes more than a second just to start responding. Those are hard to patch and are one of the genuine reasons to rebuild.

Speed costs real money. Google's own research found that the chance of someone leaving rises by about a third as load time goes from one second to three. If you pay for clicks, a slow page also means you pay for visitors who leave before they see anything.

Score: 0 if all three pages pass on mobile. 1 if they are borderline or only one fails. 2 if two or more fail even after the images are optimised.

Check 2: Does it work properly on a phone?

Do not use a resized desktop window for this. Pick up a real phone, switch off the wifi so you are on mobile data, and try to behave like a customer who needs help now. Set yourself five tasks:

1. Find your phone number within five seconds of the page loading.
2. Tap the number and check it starts a call.
3. Open a service page and read it without pinching or zooming.
4. Find your prices, or a clear explanation of how you quote.
5. Send an enquiry using only your thumb.

While you do this, look out for the usual faults. Text smaller than about 16px is hard to read outdoors. Buttons and links that sit too close together lead to mis-taps, and Google recommends tap targets of around 48px. Pop-ups that cover the whole screen are another problem, as are cookie banners that fill half the page and sideways scrolling. Check also that the form is built for phones, so the email field brings up the email keyboard and the phone field brings up the number pad.

Then back it up with data. In Google Analytics, compare the share of visitors on mobile with the share of enquiries from mobile. If 65% of your visitors are on phones but only 20% of your enquiries come from them, people are trying and failing. Try the site on an older Android phone as well as a recent iPhone, and hand it to someone over 60 and watch where they get stuck, without helping. You will learn more in two minutes than from any report.

Score: 0 if every task is easy. 1 if one or two tasks are awkward. 2 if you could not complete a task, or the site looks like a shrunken desktop page.

Check 3: Is the site producing enough enquiries?

This is the check that matters most, because it ties the website to money. First, count your enquiries for the last 12 months from every route: contact forms, emails, calls, WhatsApp messages and quote requests. Many owners only count forms and underestimate by half. Add a simple question to your calls and quotes: "How did you find us?" Over a few weeks that will tell you how much work really starts online.

Next, work out your enquiry rate, which is enquiries divided by visitors. Take an example: 1,200 visitors in a month and 12 enquiries is a rate of 1%. Service businesses with a clear, well-built site commonly see rates of 2% to 5%, though this varies by trade and by how well the traffic is targeted. Treat that as a rough guide, not a target.

Now put a value on it. Suppose your average job is worth £450 and you win one enquiry in three. Each enquiry is then worth about £150 to you. Lifting 12 enquiries a month to 24 would be worth roughly £1,800 a month, or over £21,000 a year, from the same visitors. That is the figure to hold up against any redesign quote.

Compare like with like. Use the same month last year, not last month, because a landscaper in January and a landscaper in May are not comparable. Then work out what kind of problem you have:

• Visitors steady, enquiries falling: this points to the site itself. Slow pages, weak trust signals, an awkward form or a dated look could all be putting people off.
• Visitors falling, enquiries falling in step: this is mainly a visibility problem. A new design alone will not fix it. You need better content, local SEO or advertising, and a redesign only helps if the old site is holding back the SEO.
• Visitors and enquiries both steady but low: look at your offer, your pricing and your Google Business Profile before blaming the design.

Make sure tracking is honest. In Google Analytics 4, set up form submissions and taps on your phone number as key events, and filter out your own visits. Check that spam enquiries are not inflating the count, as a form without protection can show 40 "enquiries" a month of which only 8 are real.

Score: 0 if enquiries are rising or comfortably meet your needs. 1 if they are flat. 2 if they are falling while visitor numbers hold up, or you cannot say how many you get because nothing is tracked.

Check 4: Is anything out of date or wrong?

Read your own site slowly, page by page, as a stranger would. Better still, ask someone who does not know your business to do it. Mark anything that fits this list:

• A copyright notice in the footer showing a year several years old
• Staff who have left, or missing staff who have joined
• Prices, opening hours or service areas that have changed
• Services you no longer offer, or new ones that are not mentioned
• Banners or notices about events long past, including old pandemic messages
• Photos more than five years old, or stock images that do not show your real work
• A blog or news page whose latest post is years old
• Broken links, which a free checker such as Dead Link Checker will find in minutes
• Testimonials with no names, dates or links to the original review

Then check the things the law expects. If you trade as a limited company, your website should show the company name, registration number and registered office address. If you are VAT registered, your VAT number should be there too. You also need a privacy policy that matches what you really do with data, and a cookie banner that follows UK GDPR and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR). Non-essential cookies, such as marketing trackers, should not load until someone agrees. The ICO website explains the basics in plain English.

Do not forget the technical side. Look for a padlock in the browser, which shows the site uses HTTPS. If your site runs on WordPress, check whether the core software, theme and plugins are updated. Abandoned plugins are a common way for small business sites to get hacked, and cleaning up afterwards often costs more than a rebuild would have.

Lastly, type site:yourdomain.co.uk into Google. This shows what Google has stored about you. Old pages, strange titles or odd results can reveal problems you never knew about.

A useful test: can you or your team change text and swap a photo yourselves in under ten minutes? If every small edit means emailing a developer and waiting a fortnight, content goes stale. That is a strong sign that a different set-up is needed, whatever the site looks like.

Score: 0 if you found a couple of small fixes. 1 if several pages need real rewriting. 2 if key facts are wrong, legal details are missing, or you cannot edit the site yourself.

The readiness test

Now add it all up. Give yourself one point for every statement below that is true of your site. The four checks above should answer most of them.

1. On mobile, the key pages fail Core Web Vitals even after the images are sorted.
2. You struggled with at least one of the five phone tasks.
3. Enquiries are lower than a year ago, even though visitor numbers have held up.
4. The site is more than five years old and has never had a major rework.
5. You cannot update text and images yourself without help.
6. Important pages contain facts that are wrong or missing.
7. Visitors cannot tell what to do next, because there is no clear call to action at the top of each key page.
8. The site shows security warnings, runs old software or has been hacked.
9. It looks dated next to your three closest competitors, or customers have said so.
10. Your business has changed, with new services, a new area or a new type of customer, and the site does not reflect it.

What your score means

• 0 to 2: leave it. Carry on, and put a repeat check in the diary. Spend the money on getting more visitors instead.
• 3 to 5: tune it up. Fix speed, forms, calls to action and content on the existing site. For a small business site this is often a few hundred pounds to about £1,000, depending on how much needs doing.
• 6 to 7: refresh. Keep the structure and platform but redo the design of key pages, rewrite weak content and rebuild the pages that matter most. Budgets of roughly £1,000 to £3,000 are common, though they vary by agency and scope.
• 8 to 10: redesign. The foundations are the problem, so patching will cost more over time than starting again. A bespoke small business site typically starts at a few thousand pounds, rising with the number of pages and features such as online booking or e-commerce.

Treat these price bands as ballparks to help you plan, not quotes. What you actually pay depends on scope, content and who builds it.

When a redesign is the wrong answer

A new website will not fix a business with no visitors. If your traffic is the problem, check your Google Business Profile, your reviews and whether your pages target the services and towns people search for. If you have never claimed or updated your Google Business Profile, that is a better first £0 to spend than a new design. A redesign also will not fix an offer that is unclear, or prices that are too high for your market. And it is a poor use of money if the real issue is that nobody follows up enquiries quickly. Many local firms lose work simply because a quote request sits unanswered for two days.

How to redesign without losing the rankings and customers you already have

A redesign can quietly wipe out years of search visibility if it is handled carelessly. The new site looks lovely, launches on a Friday, and by the following month the phone has gone quiet. Almost all of that is avoidable with some groundwork.

Before launch: record what you have

Crawl the old site first. The free version of Screaming Frog will list up to 500 URLs, which covers most small business sites. Export the list, then match it against Google Analytics and Search Console to mark the pages that earn traffic or bring in enquiries. Those are the pages you protect.

In Search Console, open the Performance report, set the date range to 16 months and export the pages that get clicks. Keep that file. It is your before picture, and you will compare against it after launch. Also note your top ten search queries and where you rank for them, so you can tell a real drop from normal movement.

Then set up a 301 redirect from every old URL to its new equivalent. Missing redirects are the classic cause of a post-launch traffic drop, because Google and anyone with an old link or bookmark land on an error page. If a page no longer exists, send it to the closest relevant page, not just the homepage.

A redirect map is just a two-column spreadsheet. For example:

• /boiler-repair.html redirects to /services/boiler-repair/
• /about-us.php redirects to /about/
• /news/2016/winter-tips redirects to /advice/winter-heating-tips/

Test a sample after launch, and avoid redirect chains where A goes to B and then to C, since each hop slows things down and can lose value. Where you can, keep the old URL as it is. If a page ranks well at /plumber-worthing/ there is rarely a good reason to rename it.

Keep what already works

Do not rebuild everything for the sake of it. Keep strong pages, your best reviews and testimonials, and a phone number customers already recognise. Make sure your name, address and phone number on the new site match your Google Business Profile exactly. Even small differences, such as "Road" on one and "Rd" on the other, can muddy the signals for local search.

If a page already ranks on page one, resist the urge to reword it from top to bottom. Improve the layout and add to it, but keep the headings, key phrases and the information that earned the ranking.

Build the SEO in, not on afterwards

Ask for these from day one, not as an add-on:

• Page titles and meta descriptions written for each page
• One clear H1 per page, with sensible headings beneath it
• Local content, such as the towns you cover and the services you offer there
• Schema markup, so search engines can read your business details
• An XML sitemap, submitted in Google Search Console

Page titles should be unique, written for people, and roughly 50 to 60 characters so they are not cut off in the results. Something like "Boiler Repair in Worthing | Gas Safe Engineers" works far better than "Home" or "Services". Meta descriptions will not change your ranking directly, but a clear one of around 150 characters helps more people click.

For local schema, ask for LocalBusiness markup that includes your name, address, phone number, opening hours and service area. You can check it with Google's Rich Results Test. Also check that every image has a short, accurate description (alt text), which helps both search and visitors using screen readers.

Test before going live

Preview everything on a staging site, which is a private copy of the new site. Check it on real phones, not just a resized browser window. Submit every form and confirm the enquiry actually arrives in your inbox. Check that analytics tracking is installed and recording, or you will be flying blind afterwards.

Staging sites are normally hidden from Google with a "noindex" setting, and this is where a well-known mistake happens. If that setting is not removed on launch day, the live site tells Google to ignore it, and traffic collapses within days. On launch day, check the site settings, view the page source for the word "noindex", and look at the robots.txt file at yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt for a line reading Disallow: /. It takes two minutes and could save you months of lost enquiries.

Also test the extras: the thank-you page after a form, the autoresponder email, the phone number links, the 404 page and the cookie banner. Check that the SSL certificate is valid, and that the old http and www versions of your address redirect to the single version you want.

Choose your launch time with care. Avoid your busiest season, and avoid Friday afternoons when nobody is around to catch problems. A Tuesday morning gives you three working days to spot and fix anything.

Watch the first 90 days

Check rankings, enquiries and Search Console crawl errors weekly. A small dip in the first few weeks can be normal while Google re-crawls the site. A dip that is still there after six to eight weeks needs action, usually a missed redirect, a slow page or content that was thinned out in the rewrite.

In Search Console, check the Pages report for URLs marked "Not found (404)" and fix them with redirects. Use the URL Inspection tool and "Request indexing" for your most important new pages. Then compare clicks for your key pages with the export you saved before launch. If a page that used to get 80 clicks a month now gets 10, look at that page first. It may have lost its redirect, been reworded, or been buried deeper in the menu.

Do the same with enquiries. Keep your pre-launch baseline from the readiness test in front of you, and compare the same weeks year on year to allow for seasonality. The aim is not just to avoid a drop. After a good redesign you should see the enquiry rate climb within a couple of months, and if it has not, go back to the speed and phone checks and look for what was missed.

Your next step: a one-week plan to decide and act

You do not need a big project to find out where you stand. Spend a few short sessions this week and you will have a decision backed by evidence.

1. Day 1: Write down what the website is for, then note your baseline: monthly visitors and enquiries.
2. Day 2: Run a speed test on your homepage and two key pages. Screenshot the results.
3. Day 3: Use your site on a phone. Try to find your number, read a service page and send an enquiry.
4. Day 4: Look at your enquiry data for the last 12 months. Is it rising, flat or sliding?
5. Day 5: Read every page as a stranger would. Mark anything out of date, wrong or missing.
6. Day 6: Score the site using the readiness test.
7. Day 7: Decide: leave it, tune it up, refresh it or redesign it.

Each session should take 30 to 45 minutes. Keep it all in one document with dated screenshots, so that in six months you can see whether things have improved or slipped.

If the score points to a redesign

Gather your screenshots, your written goals, three competitor sites you admire and a rough budget before you contact anyone. Agencies can quote far more accurately when they can see what you have already worked out.

Also write down what you want to keep, such as pages that rank, the brand colours, a good logo, and what you hate about the current site. Be ready to supply your own photos, since real pictures of your team and your work beat stock images, and it is often photography and written content that hold up a project, not the build itself.

Whoever you speak to, ask these questions:

• Who owns the site and its content once it is built?
• What hosting and support are included, and what do they cost afterwards?
• How will redirects be handled so we keep our rankings?
• What is the timeline, and what do you need from us to hit it?

Ownership matters more than most people expect. Make sure you own your domain name in your name, and that you can take your content and files with you if you ever move. Ask to see examples of similar sites the agency has built, and speak to a past client if you can. On timelines, a small business site often takes somewhere between four and ten weeks, and the biggest delays usually come from content arriving late. Finally, ask for fixed prices in writing, with a clear note of what counts as extra.

If the score says leave it

That is a perfectly good result. Put a repeat check in your diary for six months' time, because speed, phones and search habits keep moving even when your site stands still.

Not sure what your score means? Samson Web Design is happy to give you a free review of your site, with straight answers and no pressure. Just get in touch and ask.