Reviewing a Decade-Old Website With Fresh Eyes

The hardest thing about an old website review is that the person best placed to do it is the person least able to. You have looked at your homepage a thousand times. You no longer read it, you recognize it. The stale year in the footer has been there so long it has become part of the furniture.

This is the procedure we follow when we audit a site for the first time, written so you can run it on your own. It is deliberately ordered. Each stage asks a question the previous stage has made answerable, and the order is what keeps you from spending the whole review on the logo.

Stage one: arrive as a stranger

Do not type your domain into a browser. Search for what a customer would search for, on your phone, and arrive the way they arrive. Very often that lands you on an interior page rather than the homepage, which is itself the first finding for most owners.

Then give the page five seconds and look away. Write down what you learned. A stranger deciding between three contractors gives you about that long, and if the answer to "what does this business do and where" is not immediately available, nothing else on the site gets a chance.

This stage catches the homepage slideshow problem, where the first screen is consumed by a rotating stock photograph and the actual answer sits below the fold. It also catches thin content. In our corpus of 45 audited contractor sites, 7 had homepages under 200 visible words, which is rarely enough to answer the five-second question.

Stage two: try to contact yourself

Still on the phone, try to make contact the way a customer would. Tap the phone number. Does it dial?

This is the stage that produces the most valuable finding on most sites. Twenty of the 45 sites in our corpus displayed a phone number with no click-to-call link. It is the costliest defect we find and the first one we fix, and almost every owner is surprised by it, because they have never once tapped their own number.

Then find the contact form and fill it in. Not a test message to yourself from your own network, but genuinely: how many fields does it ask for, and would you bother on a phone? Send it, and see whether it arrives. We do not measure form delivery in our audits and make no claims about how often it fails, but checking your own is free and worth doing, because a form quietly dropping messages is the kind of failure that produces no complaints, only silence.

Stage three: check the facts

Now read the site for accuracy rather than quality. This is unglamorous and it finds more than any design critique.

• The copyright year in the footer, stale on 23 of the 45 sites we audited
• The phone number, address, and hours, checked against what is actually true today
• License and insurance details, and whether the business name beside them still matches
• Any leftover template or placeholder text, which we found visible on 12 of 45 sites
• Prices, promotions, or seasonal offers that expired at some point

Placeholder text is worth dwelling on. It is not usually Latin filler in an obvious block. It is a stray "Your Company Name Here" in a sidebar, or a services description that came with the theme and was never replaced, sitting three scrolls down where nobody looks. It signals abandonment more loudly than a stale year does.

Stage four: check the machinery

Only now look at how the site is built, because the answers here determine whether the earlier findings can be fixed cheaply or need a rebuild.

Does the address bar show a padlock, or is the site still on plain HTTP? Ten of the 45 sites in our corpus were served over HTTP only, which browsers now flag to visitors directly. Can you pinch to zoom, or has that been disabled, as it was on two sites? Does the layout adapt when you rotate the phone, or does it stay a shrunken desktop page, which is what a missing viewport tag produces on the 10 sites that lacked one?

Tap a few links, particularly in the navigation and the footer. Links that look clickable and do nothing were present on 3 of our 45 sites, and they cluster on the pages nobody has opened in years.

Stage five: only now, the appearance

The logo and the colors come last on purpose. They are what owners want to discuss first, and they are almost never the constraint.

Logo usability was the most common finding in our corpus, below threshold on 25 of 45 sites, but it is mostly a technical measure: whether the mark survives being displayed small, whether it reads against its background, whether it holds up on a phone. That is a rendering question with a cheap answer, not a rebranding question.

If the site failed stages one through four, fixing the logo changes nothing. If it passed them, the logo is worth attention. That ordering is the whole point of doing the review in sequence.

What to do with the list

You will finish with a list of maybe fifteen items. Sort them by what they cost to fix rather than by how much they bother you. The click-to-call link, the viewport tag, the footer year, the unblocked zoom, and the dead links are close to free, and on a real share of sites they recover most of the available value.

What remains after the cheap fixes is the honest scope of a redesign. If that list is short, you do not need one yet. If the site cannot support the cheap fixes at all, which is what a table-based layout or a dead DIY builder usually means, then the rebuild is the fix. Our published pricing starts at $2,500 for a Skim Refresh of up to five pages, $5,500 for a Fresh Pour covering 10 to 15, and from $12,000 for a Whole Carton with e-commerce, booking, or custom work.

The median score across our corpus was 27 out of 100. Most of those sites were reasonable when they launched. What separates the ones scoring 70 from the ones scoring 27 is not budget, it is whether anyone has run this review in the last few years.