Start from the assumption you do not
Most businesses that arrive asking for a new website do not need one. They need the form fixed, the images compressed, and the booking wired in properly. A rebuild costs more, takes longer, and resets whatever Google already knows about the site. It is the right answer sometimes, and it is the answer a studio profits from suggesting, which is why you should run this check yourself first.
Ten minutes, on your phone, away from your own Wi-Fi.
Minute 1: load the home page on mobile data
Count. If the page is readable and usable inside two seconds, good. Three to four, it needs work but not a rebuild. If you are still waiting at five, note it. Slow is usually images and scripts, both fixable without touching the design.
Minute 2: try to book or enquire
Do what a customer would do. Find the booking button or the form, fill it in, submit it. Then check your inbox and spam folder. No email within five minutes means a dead form, which is the most common fault on small business sites and one of the cheapest to fix.
Minute 3: look at it on the phone honestly
Does text run off the edge? Do you have to pinch to read? Are buttons too small to tap? Is anything overlapping? Layout faults on mobile are usually a theme or plugin update, fixable. A site that was never designed for phones at all is a rebuild candidate; note which it is.
Minute 4: check the padlock
Does the browser show the site as secure, or does it say "Not secure"? A missing padlock is a certificate problem and is fixed in an hour. It is not a reason to rebuild, but it is urgent.
Minute 5: search your business name
Is your site the first result? Does the title and description under it look right, or does it say "Home" or show a random sentence? Wrong titles are a content fix. Not appearing at all is worth a closer look but rarely means rebuild.
Minute 6: read your own prices and hours
Are they current? If prices live in a PDF or an image, or the hours are wrong because changing them means calling someone, that is an editing problem. It can often be fixed by restructuring a page rather than rebuilding a site.
Minute 7: try to log in
Go to the admin login. Do you have a working username and password? If not, whose email does the reset go to? Not having access is not a website fault, but it decides who can fix anything else, so it comes first.
Minute 8: look at the photos
Are they yours, or stock? Are they sharp on a phone, or stretched? Photos are content, not structure. New photos on an old site are one of the cheapest transformations there is.
Minute 9: count what is on the home page
If it is more than about six things, it is trying to do too much. Trimming a home page is an afternoon, not a rebuild.
Minute 10: ask what the site is for
Write one sentence: "This site exists to ___." For a booking-led business the blank is "get people to book". If the site does not obviously do that, the problem may be structure rather than technology, and that can still be a fix.
Scoring it
Count how many of these you noted:
- Slow load
- Dead form
- Mobile layout faults
- No padlock
- Wrong search title
- Uneditable prices or hours
- No admin access
- Weak photos
- Cluttered home page
- No clear purpose
Zero to three: you need fixes, not a site. Most are an afternoon each.
Four to six: you need a proper look at what is under the surface, because several things have been neglected and there may be more. A diagnosis before any decision.
Seven or more: a rebuild is likely to be cheaper than fixing everything, but get the diagnosis anyway, because the four findings below are what actually decide it.
The four findings that genuinely mean rebuild
Only a look inside can confirm these, and they are the ones that tip the decision:
- The platform is abandoned. A builder that no longer exists, a theme whose author vanished years ago, a framework two major versions behind with no upgrade path.
- It was never built for phones. Not broken on mobile; designed without mobile in mind. Retrofitting that is more expensive than starting over.
- Security is unrecoverable. Compromised in a way that cleaning cannot be trusted, or running software so old it cannot be patched.
- The content model is wrong for the business. A brochure site trying to become a booking site, with no structure for services, staff or prices. Bolting booking onto it produces a worse result than building around it.
Absent those four, fix it.
What we do
The $299 diagnosis is this check done properly, from the inside, with a written answer to "fix or rebuild" and the cost of each. It is yours to take anywhere. Most of them end in three fixes, which is what you would hope for, and the ones that end in rebuild come with the reason written down.