Is your website outdated? A twelve-point checklist

You can run every check here yourself, on your own phone, in about five minutes. No tools, no audit, nobody to call. At the end there's a scoring guide that tells you honestly whether this is urgent, worth planning for, or genuinely fine as it is.

Before you start

Two rules, and they matter more than the checks themselves.

Use your phone, not your computer. Most of your visitors are on a phone and a site can look completely fine on a desktop while being unusable on mobile. If you check on a laptop you will pass tests you are actually failing.

Pretend you have never seen it before. This is the hard part. You know where everything is, so you cannot judge whether it's findable. If you can, hand your phone to someone who doesn't know your business, ask them to find your opening hours, and watch without helping. Ten seconds of that is worth more than this entire article.

Checks 1–4: the phone test

Open your site on your phone. Do not zoom.

1. Can you read the text without pinching? If your first instinct is to zoom in, that's a fail. Every visitor has the same instinct, and a meaningful share of them just leave instead.
2. Does the page scroll sideways? Swipe left and right. If anything moves horizontally, the layout is broken on mobile. This is one of the most common faults on older sites and one of the most damaging.
3. Can you tap the menu and the links accurately, first time? If you have to aim carefully, or you hit the wrong link, the tap targets are desktop-sized. Thumbs are not mouse pointers.
4. Is the phone number tappable? Tap it. If it starts a call, pass. If it's an image, or plain text you'd have to copy, or hidden three clicks deep on a contact page, fail. This one check probably costs more businesses more money than the other eleven combined.

Checks 5–8: the trust test

Still on your phone. Now read it as a stranger deciding whether you're worth calling.

5. Does the first screen say what you do and where? Not your name and a slogan — what you actually do, for whom, in which area. "Welcome to our website" and "Quality service since 1994" both fail this. They sound like content but carry no information.
6. Is every fact on the site correct today? Opening hours, phone number, services, staff, prices. Wrong hours are worse than no hours: someone drives to a closed shop and does not come back.
7. Is there any visible date that isn't current? A copyright line saying 2016, a "news" section whose last post is from 2019, an event page for something that already happened. A visitor reads any of these as "possibly no longer trading".
8. Does it contain any of the classic tells? A visitor counter. A guestbook. "Best viewed in Internet Explorer". A menu or price list as a PDF download. A Flash notice. Stock photos of people in suits shaking hands. Text over a photographic background. Any one of these dates the site by more than a decade in a single glance.

Checks 9–12: the technical test

You don't need any tools for these either.

9. How long does it take to appear? Turn off wi-fi so you're on mobile data, then load the home page and count. Under two seconds is good. Over four and you are losing people before they see anything at all. Big uncompressed photos are almost always the cause.
10. Does the address bar show a padlock? No padlock, or a "Not secure" warning, means there's no valid certificate. Browsers now say so prominently, and visitors believe them. This is cheap to fix and expensive to leave.
11. Do all the links work? Tap every menu item and every button. Dead links, pages that load empty, forms that error, a map that doesn't appear — all common on sites nobody has opened in years.
12. Search your business name and look at the result. Does the title in the search result read like a sentence about your business, or does it say "Home" or "index" or your domain name? That line is often the first thing a customer ever reads about you.

Scoring it honestly

Count your failures. Then read the band you land in — and resist the urge to round down.

0–1 failures: it's fine

Genuinely fine. Whatever a provider tells you, a site that passes eleven or twelve of these is doing its job. Fix the single item and spend your money elsewhere. If someone quotes you for a redesign after this score, ask them which of the twelve points it improves.

2–4 failures: worth planning, not urgent

Look at which ones failed. If they're checks 6 and 7 — wrong information, old dates — that's an afternoon of updates, not a new website. If they're checks 1 to 4, the mobile experience is broken and that is worth taking seriously, because it affects most of your visitors.

5–8 failures: this is costing you now

At this level the site is actively working against you. Every check that fails is a reason someone decided not to call. A rebuild is usually cheaper and faster than patching a site of this age, because the underlying structure is generally the thing causing the failures.

9–12 failures: it's doing damage

A site in this state is worse than no site, because a stranger comparing you to two competitors now has evidence rather than uncertainty. If a rebuild isn't possible right now, the honest interim step is to take it down and make sure your business listing is complete and current instead. That is free and it is better than this.

What to do with the answer

Whatever your score, the priority order is the same, and it is not the order most people choose:

1. Correct information first. Wrong hours and a wrong phone number cost you customers today, and fixing them is free.
2. Then contact routes. A tappable number and a working form. Cheap, and the highest-return change on the list.
3. Then the mobile layout. If checks 1–3 fail, this usually means rebuilding rather than adjusting.
4. Then speed. Often just a matter of compressing images properly.
5. Design last. Genuinely last. A dated design with correct information and a working call button outperforms a beautiful site that hides the phone number.

If you take one thing from this article, take that order. Most redesigns start at step five and never get around to steps one and two, which is why so many businesses spend real money and notice no difference afterwards.