5 signs your website needs a redesign (and what it's quietly costing you)

Most business owners don't wake up and decide their website is a problem. It just sits there, doing roughly what it's always done, and it's easy to assume "roughly fine" is the same as "fine." Usually it isn't. Here are the five signs we see most often in Ottawa small businesses, and what each one is actually costing in leads you never hear about.

1. It doesn't really work on a phone

Not "it loads," but actually works: buttons big enough to tap, text that doesn't need a pinch-zoom, a contact form that doesn't fight you. Most local searches happen on a phone, and a site that's merely "shrunk down" rather than built mobile-first quietly pushes people back to the search results before they ever read what you do.

2. It hasn't been touched since it launched

We still see a lot of Ottawa business sites built in 2014 to 2017 on themes that were retired years ago. They're not always ugly, but they're built on assumptions about the web that are just out of date now, slower hosting, no real mobile handling, plugins nobody maintains anymore. Visitors pick up on that, even if they can't say exactly why.

3. It's slow, and you've stopped noticing

If you've used your own site every day for years, you stop noticing the three-second load time. New visitors don't get that grace period. Page speed is also one of the more measurable things Google factors into ranking, so a slow site is losing you two audiences at once: the visitor who bounces, and the ranking you'd otherwise have.

4. You're afraid to touch it

If updating a price, adding a photo, or fixing a typo means emailing someone and waiting a week, that's not really your website anymore, it's a website you happen to pay for. A redesign is a good moment to move onto something you can actually update yourself, or that has a real person on the other end when you need a change.

5. It doesn't clearly say what you do or how to reach you

This one's less about design and more about clarity. A surprising number of small business sites make a visitor hunt for the phone number, or bury what the business actually does under a slideshow and some stock photography. If someone can't figure out what you offer and how to contact you within about five seconds, the rest of the site's design doesn't matter much.

What a redesign actually involves

A redesign isn't starting from a blank page. We audit what's there, keep the copy and structure that's already working, and rebuild the rest on a faster, mobile-first foundation. Most small business redesigns take about 2 to 4 weeks and land somewhere between $1,500 and $3,500 depending on how many pages and features are involved. If you want the full breakdown of where that money actually goes, we wrote about it here: how much a website actually costs in Ottawa.

Common questions

Do I need to throw away my old content when I redesign?
No. A good redesign audits what you already have, keeps the copy and pages that work, and rebuilds the rest. You usually don't need to write everything from scratch.

How long does a website redesign take?
Most small business redesigns take about 2 to 4 weeks from kickoff, often faster than a brand new site since the content and structure already exist.