A landscaping company owner near Holland called us last spring with a simple complaint: people kept telling him they “couldn’t find pricing anywhere” on his site. When we pulled it up, we understood why. The pricing page existed. It just lived three clicks deep, behind a dropdown menu that didn’t work properly on phones, which happened to be how 80% of his visitors were browsing. He hadn’t touched the site since 2016. He didn’t think anything was wrong with it — it just wasn’t converting the way it used to, and he couldn’t figure out why.
That’s usually how it goes. Business owners rarely wake up and decide, out of nowhere, that they need a new website. Instead, something feels off — leads have slowed, people mention they had trouble finding something, a competitor’s site looks sharper than yours — and it’s hard to tell whether that’s a real problem or just a hunch.
So here’s a checklist we walk clients through, whether they’re in Grand Rapids, Lansing, or anywhere in between. If you find yourself nodding along to more than a few of these, it’s probably time for a conversation.
1. Your site doesn’t work well on a phone
This is the big one, and it’s non-negotiable. If people are pinching and zooming, if buttons are too small to tap accurately, or if your menu collapses into something unusable, you’re losing visitors before they ever see what you offer. Google also uses the mobile version of your site to determine how you rank in search — so a clunky mobile experience doesn’t just cost you visitors, it costs you visibility too.
2. It takes more than a few seconds to load
Every additional second of load time chips away at your conversion rate. If your homepage takes five or six seconds to appear, most visitors have already hit the back button and clicked on a competitor instead. This is especially common with older sites built on outdated platforms or stuffed with oversized, uncompressed images.
3. You can’t update it yourself
If every small change — a new phone number, an updated hours listing, a fresh photo — requires an email to a developer and a few days of waiting, your website is working against you instead of for you. A modern site should let you make basic updates without needing to file a ticket.
4. It doesn’t reflect what your business actually looks like today
We see this constantly with businesses that have grown or repositioned since their site was built. Maybe you’ve added new services, moved into a new part of West Michigan, or shifted from a general contractor to a specialist. If your website is still describing a version of your business that no longer exists, it’s not just outdated — it’s actively confusing to the people trying to hire you.
5. Your competitors’ sites look more credible than yours
People judge trustworthiness fast, often within seconds of landing on a page. If a competitor’s site looks more current, more professional, or simply more put-together than yours, that’s the impression a potential customer walks away with — regardless of who actually does better work.
6. You’re not showing up in local searches
If someone searches “web design Grand Rapids” or “electrician near Holland” and your business doesn’t appear, but three competitors do, there’s a good chance your site’s structure, content, or technical setup isn’t built for local SEO. This isn’t always about the design itself — sometimes it’s about whether the site was built with search visibility in mind at all.
7. Your contact information or calls-to-action are hard to find
Take an honest look at your homepage. Can someone tell within five seconds how to call you, request a quote, or book an appointment? If your phone number is buried in a footer or your “Contact Us” button is easy to miss, you’re making visitors work harder than they should to become customers.
8. It hasn’t been touched in three or more years
Web design trends, browser standards, and security requirements shift constantly. A site that felt current in 2020 or 2021 often looks noticeably dated now — not because the ideas were wrong, but because expectations have moved on. If you can’t remember the last time anything changed, it’s worth a look.
9. Your analytics show high bounce rates or short visit times
If you have Google Analytics set up (and if you don’t, that’s worth fixing too), check how long people are staying and how many leave without clicking anything. High bounce rates combined with short session times often point to a mismatch between what people expected to find and what they actually saw.
10. You dread sending people to your own website
This one is more gut-check than data point, but it’s telling. If you hesitate before handing someone your business card because you know what they’ll find when they look you up, that hesitation is worth paying attention to.
11. It isn’t built to handle what you actually sell
A site built years ago for a smaller service list often can’t gracefully handle the business you run now — more services, more locations, an online store, a booking system. If you’re duct-taping plugins onto an old foundation to make things work, you’re likely due for something built around your business as it exists today, not as it existed when the site was first launched.
12. You genuinely don’t know if it’s working
Sometimes the honest answer isn’t “yes, it’s a problem” or “no, it’s fine” — it’s “I have no idea.” That uncertainty is itself a signal. A website should be one of the more measurable parts of your marketing, and if you can’t say with any confidence whether it’s bringing in business, that’s worth addressing on its own.
What to do with this list
If you checked off two or three of these, it might just mean a few targeted updates — a faster host, a redesigned homepage, better calls-to-action. If you checked off six or more, it’s probably time to think about a full rebuild rather than patchwork fixes.
Either way, the goal isn’t to chase trends for their own sake. It’s to make sure the site working behind the scenes actually matches the business you’ve built in front of it. For that landscaping company owner in Holland, the fix wasn’t a total overhaul — it was rethinking navigation, rebuilding for mobile, and putting pricing where people could actually find it. Within two months, his contact form submissions had more than doubled.
Not every business needs a complete redesign. But every business deserves to know, one way or another, whether their website is helping or quietly getting in the way.
