When to redesign a website, and how to tell yours is outdated

How often should a website be redesigned?

Our view is that a website should not be redesigned on a timer. A site built well five years ago can still be doing its job, and one built badly last spring may not be. Redesign when the signs below start to pile up, and especially when the page stops working on a phone.

Those signs are more common than most owners would guess. We looked at 467 business websites we found advertising on Google, scanned in October 2026, and 72% showed at least one sign of dated technology. The typical site had one.

Very few were broken outright. 99% were served over HTTPS, and only 5% failed to adapt to a phone at all. The age shows in smaller places, and they are easy for an owner to miss: you see your own site on the same screen every day, and you already know where everything is. The full results, group by group, are in what we found in 467 business websites.

Outdated website design you can spot on your own phone

Open your homepage on your phone, the way a customer would find it, and go down this list.

The page is wider than the screen

If you have to pinch to read it, or drag the page sideways to find your phone number, it was built for a desktop. 18% of the sites we checked (82) had part of the page fixed to a desktop width, and 5% did not adapt to a phone at all.

This is the costly one. A customer on a phone who cannot find your number has the next business in the results one tap away, and you never learn they were there. It is why every Droom build is opened at fourteen screen widths, from 320 pixels up, before it goes live.

Your link arrives with no picture

Text your own web address to yourself. If it turns up as a bare address with no image or title under it, the site has no share preview. 16% of sites (77) were in that state. Customers recommend a business by sending the link, and a plain address in a group chat is easy to scroll past.

The footer shows an old year

Scroll to the very bottom. Of the 199 sites that showed a copyright year, 76% were current, meaning this year or last. 22 sites showed a year three or more years old, and 14 showed one five or more years old. Nobody picks a plumber by the footer. But a visitor who sees a year long gone at the bottom starts to wonder whether the prices and hours above it are just as old.

A slideshow rotates across the top

An old-style image slider, the banner that cycles through a few photos with a message on each, was on 10% of sites (47). A visitor in a hurry sees one slide and scrolls on, so whatever you put on the others goes unread. One clear photo and one clear line usually does the job better.

No little icon on the browser tab

The favicon is the small logo on the browser tab and beside a bookmark. 8% of sites (39) had none, so the tab shows a blank page symbol. On its own it costs you very little. It does tell a careful visitor that nobody has looked at the details in a while, and it is cheap to fix.

No padlock in the address bar

Nearly everyone has this now: only 6 of the sites we checked were not served over HTTPS. If yours is one of them, the browser labels it as not secure before the visitor has read a word. Put this at the top of the list.

Signs only your web person can see

These live in the code behind the page. You do not need to understand the code, only to know what to ask about.

Photos with no description behind them

The most common sign of all, on 22% of sites (105). Each picture should carry a short line of text, called alt text, saying what it shows. A blind customer using a screen reader hears that line in place of the photo, and search engines read it to learn what the picture is. Without it, your best photos of your work do nothing for either.

No main heading on the homepage

16% of homepages (75) had no main heading marked in the code. Your name might be on screen in big letters, but nothing tells search engines and AI assistants which line says what the page is about, so they have to guess. It is one of several quiet ways a business can go missing from AI answers.

A meta keywords tag

A list of search terms hidden in the page, found on 16% of sites (73). Google stopped reading it long ago, so it does nothing for your ranking, and it shows any competitor who looks which searches you are after. It usually means the site was set up to an older rulebook and never revisited.

Toolkits a decade old

Bootstrap 3 was on 13% of sites (60), and Font Awesome 4, from 2017 or older, on 12% (56). These are building blocks a designer works with, and customers never see the names. They matter to you because they date the last real rebuild, and old building blocks are how a small change turns into a large quote.

Code for software that has been switched off

7% of sites (35) still carried the Universal Analytics tag, Google’s old visitor counter, which Google has retired. If it is the only counter on your site, nothing has been counted for some time. Another 7% (34) carried code written for Internet Explorer, a browser Microsoft has also retired.

Questions to send your web person

Copy these into an email. A good web person can answer all of them in one reply.

• Do all the images on the site have alt text?
• Does the homepage have one main heading, and what does it say?
• Is there a meta keywords tag, and can it come out?
• What is the site built on, and are those versions still supported?
• What counts visits to the site today, and where can I see the numbers?
• How big is the homepage in kilobytes? For comparison, the median homepage we measured was 179 KB, and the heaviest tenth started at 667 KB.

If there is nobody to send it to, because the person who built the site has gone quiet, start with the rescue checklist instead.

When to redesign a website instead of fixing it

Most of these are small jobs one at a time. Alt text, a share preview, a favicon, the footer year and a stray keywords tag can all be put right on the site you have.

The sum changes when the page does not fit a phone and it sits on decade-old toolkits as well. Those two are tangled together, and repairing one tends to disturb the other. At that point, ask for a rebuild price next to the repair quote and compare them. A Droom website is $999 one time for up to five pages, or $1,999 for up to fifteen, and goes live about three weeks from the day you approve the direction.

If you would sooner not run any of this yourself, the free Field Test tests your site the way a customer uses it and emails you what fails on video, with a fixed price to fix it.