You open your website on your phone and something feels off. Enquiries have dried up. A mate mentions it looks dated. So you start thinking: new website. Before you spend anything, spend ten minutes on the diagnosis. The problem might be smaller than you think - or bigger, but in a different place.
The one question that decides everything
Where are people leaving?
Not “is the site pretty” - that comes later. The first question is: which page do visitors land on, and which page do they leave from without doing anything? If most people arrive on your homepage and leave from your homepage, the homepage is the problem. If they arrive on a service page and disappear there, thats the page to fix. A full rebuild replaces everything, including the bits that are working. That is expensive and slow for a problem that might live in one paragraph.
You can find this in Google Search Console, free, today. Log in, go to Performance › Pages, and sort by clicks. The pages with the most traffic are the ones worth fixing first - not the ones you like best.
Three things to check before you call anyone
Do these yourself, right now, on your phone. Not your desktop. Your phone.
- Can you see a phone number or a WhatsApp link without scrolling? If a visitor has to hunt for how to reach you, most wont. This is the single most common fix we make on existing sites, and it takes an afternoon.
- Does the first sentence say what you do and who for? Not your trading name. Not “welcome to our website.” Something like: We fit commercial kitchens across Kent, usually within two weeks. If a stranger couldnt say what you sell after three seconds on your homepage, rewrite that sentence before anything else.
- Does the page load in under three seconds on a mobile connection? Paste your URL into pagespeed.web.dev and look at the mobile score. Below 50 and Google is already pushing you down the results. That costs you enquiries every day it sits there.
If all three pass, the problem is probably not the website itself. It might be that not enough people are finding it - which is an SEO or traffic question, not a design one.
Three honest options
Option 1: Fix what’s broken yourself
If your site is on WordPress, Squarespace, or Wix, you can edit the homepage text, add a sticky phone number, and compress your images without paying anyone. Tools like squoosh.app cut image file sizes in seconds. This costs nothing but an hour. If the three checks above flagged small things, start here.
Where it falls down: if the site’s structure is the problem - wrong pages, no clear path to enquiry, built on a theme that’s fighting you - patching it gets expensive in your time.
Option 2: Pay someone to fix specific pages
A developer or agency can rewrite a homepage, fix load speed, or add a proper mobile menu without touching the rest of the site. This is often the right call when the rest of the site is fine and one page is doing the damage. Get a quote for the specific job, not a retainer.
Where it falls down: if the underlying platform is old or poorly built, fixes on top of it tend to create new problems. You end up paying twice.
Option 3: Start again
Sometimes a rebuild is the right answer. Signs that point that way: the site is more than five years old and built on a platform you cant edit; it has no SSL certificate, that’s the padlock in the browser bar that tells visitors the connection is secure; it doesnt appear in Google at all for your own business name; or the business has changed so much that the old site is actively misleading people.
A simple five-page site built to rank on Google and route enquiries straight to your phone or WhatsApp starts from £800 with us. Anything with a content management system, a booking engine, or custom logic is scoped after a conversation - the price depends on what the site needs to do.
Where it falls down: a new site takes time to rank. If you need enquiries next week, fix the existing site and run a Google ad while the new one builds authority. Dont rebuild and wait.
The honest recommendation
Do the three checks. If one of them fails, fix that thing first - it will cost less than a rebuild and you’ll know within a month whether it moved the needle. If all three fail, or if the site is structurally broken, a rebuild is probably cheaper in the long run than repeated patches.
The businesses we’ve seen get the best return from a new site are the ones who came to us having already tried the fixes. They knew exactly what wasn’t working. That clarity makes the build faster and the result sharper.
One thing we can do right now
If you want a second pair of eyes, we’ll look at your top three pages in Google Search Console and tell you whether a fix or a rebuild makes more sense for your situation - no charge, no obligation, and a straight answer either way. If the honest answer is “fix it yourself,” we’ll tell you that too.
