Is my website too outdated, and is it costing me jobs?
When you are wondering if your site is too old to keep bringing in work, age is the wrong measuring stick. A home service website is outdated when it stops getting the phone to ring, not when it hits a certain birthday. The real signs: it is clumsy on a phone, it is slow to load, there is no tap-to-call button, or it does not show recent work and reviews. If a homeowner scrolling on their phone cannot tell what you do and call you in a few seconds, that site is costing you jobs right now, no matter how new it is.
By Jacob Graber, founder of Blessed Arc Media · Updated
Does website age actually matter?
Website age by itself tells you almost nothing about whether it is losing you jobs. Most advice defaults to a calendar rule, redesign every 2 to 3 years, because it is easy to say and hard to argue with. But it is not tied to anything real. I have seen 6 year old sites that still load fast, still work fine on a phone, and still bring in calls every week. I have also seen sites built last year that are already costing their owner leads because nobody checked how it actually performs for a stranger on a phone. What actually matters is whether the site still does its one job: turning a person with a problem into a phone call. If it is doing that, leave it alone. If it is not, the fix is not how old it is. The fix is figuring out which specific thing is broken.
What are the signs your website is actually losing you customers?
The signs are pretty simple, and none of them have to do with how nice the site looks. Each one you can check yourself in a couple minutes, right on your phone, no developer needed.
What matters is whether someone standing over a leaking pipe or a dead A/C can act on your site fast enough before they call the next name on the list.
- It breaks or is clumsy to use on a phone, buttons too small to tap, text that overlaps, a form that won't submit.
- It's slow to load over cell data. That's a separate check worth doing on its own.
- There's no tap-to-call button, so someone has to copy the number instead of tapping it.
- It doesn't show recent work or reviews.
- People mention it looks old. That's not vanity, that's a real customer telling you they hesitated before calling.
How do you actually check your own site?
The quickest check is a stranger test: open your site on your phone, on cell data, and see how fast you could find your own phone number and call it. If that takes more than a few seconds, you have your answer.
Usually it is one specific thing behind it, the mobile layout, the load time, or a missing tap-to-call button. When patching will not fix it, that is when a full rebuild focused on mobile speed and tap-to-call makes sense, which is the web design work we do for home service businesses.
Not sure if your site is actually the problem?
We'll look at it and give you a straight answer, even if the answer is it's fine.
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