What to fix first on a website that is five years old

A website that is five years old is not necessarily a bad website. It is a website that has been standing still while your business moved. Before you spend money on anything, there is a sensible order to work in: wrong things first, slow things second, ugly things last.

1. Fix anything that is untrue

Start with facts, because a wrong fact costs you a customer and an old design only costs you a little polish. Go through the site with a pen and a cup of coffee, and check:

• The phone number. Call it from your cell and see who answers.
• The address, the hours and the area you serve.
• The list of services. Remove what you no longer do and add what you now do.
• Prices, if you show them.
• The people. Someone who left two years ago should not be on the team page.
• The copyright line in the footer. If it says 2021, the whole site looks abandoned.

This takes an afternoon and costs nothing. It is also the work most likely to be skipped, because it is dull.

2. Send yourself an enquiry

Fill in your own contact form, from a phone, as if you were a customer. Then check that the message arrived, who received it, and how long it took. Forms break quietly. An email address changes, a spam filter starts catching the messages, and for months nobody notices that the enquiries have stopped.

If the form fails, nothing else on this list matters until it is fixed.

Fix what is wrong before you fix what is old.

3. Look at it on a phone

Five years ago, many sites were built for a desktop screen first. Open yours on your phone and try to do what a customer would do. Can you read the text without pinching? Does the phone number dial when you tap it? Do the buttons sit far enough apart for a thumb? If you have to zoom or scroll sideways, you are losing visitors at the door.

4. Check for warnings and slowness

If your browser shows a "not secure" label next to the address, or the site does not load over https, fix that now. It is usually a setting and a certificate, not a rebuild. Then time the homepage on a phone using mobile data, not your office wifi. The usual cause of a slow old site is large photos that were never resized. Shrinking them is one of the cheapest improvements there is.

5. Find the broken pieces

Click every link in the menu and every button. Old sites collect dead links, missing images and pages that point to a supplier who has since closed. A page that says "not found" tells the visitor you are not paying attention.

6. Replace the photos that date it

Now you can think about looks. Real photos of your actual work, your actual shop and your actual people do more than any redesign. If the last team photo has someone in it who left, or a truck you sold, update it. A phone camera in good daylight is often enough.

7. Last, decide whether it needs rebuilding

Only after the steps above can you judge whether the structure itself is the problem. Maybe every small change means a new invoice, or the platform no longer receives updates, or the business has changed so much that the pages no longer fit. Those are real reasons to rebuild. A tired colour scheme is not one.

Notice what this order does. Steps one to six are cheap, and several can be done by you. They also show you what is really wrong, so that if you do hire someone, you can describe the job properly.

Where to start

1. Block out one hour this week and read every page for facts that are no longer true.
2. Call your own number and submit your own form from a phone.
3. Click every link and button and write down the ones that fail.
4. Check for the "not secure" label and time the homepage on mobile data.
5. Pick the five worst photos and plan to replace them.

At the end you will have a list. Some items you can fix yourself the same day, and the rest make a clear brief for anyone you ask to help.

Next: The quote that takes three hours: where the time goes