How do I know if my business website is outdated?

Eight signs, in order of how much they cost you

1. It is slow or awkward on a phone. Most visitors are on a phone. If the menu is a PDF, the text needs zooming or the call button is hard to find, they leave.
2. You cannot update it. If changing opening hours means an email to a developer, the site will be out of date, and customers notice.
3. The design dates the business. Visitors judge quality by what they see. A tired site makes a good business look tired.
4. It is missing required legal pages. In Portugal the electronic complaints book link and the company details are mandatory for consumer businesses. In Germany an incomplete Impressum invites a warning letter.
5. It tracks without consent. Analytics, embedded maps or fonts loaded from third-party servers before the visitor agrees.
6. It still links to things that no longer exist, such as the EU online dispute platform that closed in July 2025, old services or old staff.
7. It fails basic accessibility checks. Poor contrast, missing image descriptions, forms that cannot be used with a keyboard. For online shops and booking services, accessibility has been a legal requirement since June 2025, with an exemption for micro-enterprises providing services.
8. AI assistants describe you wrongly or not at all. Ask ChatGPT or Gemini about your business. If the answer is vague, your site is not giving them clear information.

Redesign or modernise?

If the brand and structure still work, modernising the existing site is cheaper: speed, mobile, legal pages, accessibility and refreshed content. If the site cannot be updated, or the business has changed, a redesign is the better investment. Either way, existing URLs must be redirected so the move does not cost you rankings.