Articles ·
7 signs your website is outdated — and how to check each one in a minute
A website rarely breaks overnight. It ages quietly: it still opens, the phone number is still there, but customers, Google and AI assistants trust it a little less every year. Here are seven signs an owner can spot without a developer, and what to do about each.
1. The copyright year in the footer is old
Scroll to the very bottom of your home page. If it says © 2019, visitors read that as “nobody has looked after this site since 2019”. It is a one-minute fix, but it is usually a symptom: if nobody updated the footer, nobody updated the software either.
2. It looks wrong or is hard to use on a phone
Open your site on your own phone. Do you have to zoom in to read? Are buttons too small to tap? Most visitors come from mobile, and Google ranks sites by their mobile version. If the site was built before mobile was the norm, patching it is often harder than rebuilding it.
3. It takes more than three seconds to load
Open the site on mobile data, not office Wi-Fi, and count. Every extra second loses visitors, and slow sites rank lower. Heavy, uncompressed photos and old themes loaded with unused scripts are the usual causes.
4. The platform and plugins have not been updated for a long time
Ask your developer one question: when were the platform and plugins last updated? Outdated WordPress plugins and old libraries such as jQuery 1.x are the most common way small business sites get hacked. If the answer is “we cannot update, it will all break”, that is a clear sign the site needs replacing, not patching.
5. Anyone can send email in your company’s name
This one is invisible from the website, but it is part of the same domain. Without SPF and DMARC records, a fraudster can email your customers from your address: “new bank details”, “invoice attached”. In our study of 71 private clinic websites, not one domain blocked spoofed email. You can check yours in a second with our free DMARC & SPF checker.
6. People with disabilities cannot use it
Images with no text description, low-contrast text, forms that cannot be filled in with a keyboard. Beyond being unfair to customers, this is now a legal question in Europe: the European Accessibility Act applies from June 2025 to many online services. Read more in Accessibility fines in Europe.
7. Google and AI assistants cannot read it properly
Search your company name plus your main service. If competitors appear and you do not, check the basics: page titles, descriptions, a sitemap. More and more customers also ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for recommendations, and some old sites accidentally block those assistants or give them nothing readable.
Fix it or build a new one?
One or two signs: usually a fix is enough, often a day or two of work. Four or more, especially sign 4: rebuilding is often cheaper than endless patching, and you get speed, security and accessibility built in from the start. See our website redesign service.
Check all seven at once
The free OLBO Website Checker checks most of these signs and more in about a minute: hosting, security settings, email protection, outdated components, known vulnerabilities, accessibility basics, Google and AI visibility, and mobile speed. The result is a score and a traffic light for each item, in plain language, with what to fix first.