Do I need a new website: how to tell before you spend anything.

A rebuild is warranted when the site cannot be edited, is slow on a phone, or was built on something no longer supported. Everything else is a fix, not a rebuild.

Looking dated is not on that list, and it is the reason most rebuilds get bought. A plain site that loads fast and says clearly what the business does will out-earn a beautiful one that takes six seconds to appear.

Genuine reasons to rebuild

• Nobody can edit it.

  If changing a phone number needs a developer, the site will quietly go out of date and no amount of design fixes that.

• It is slow on a phone.

  Most visitors are on a phone on mobile data. A site that takes several seconds loses a meaningful share of them before it appears.

• It runs on something unsupported.

  Old platforms stop receiving security updates, and that becomes a real problem rather than an aesthetic one.

• There is no page for what you sell.

  A single page listing eight services cannot rank for any of them properly.

Speed on a phone, a page for each service, obvious contact details, and words that say what the business does in the first screen. All four are cheaper than a rebuild and matter more.

The first screen is where most of the damage is done. A visitor decides in a couple of seconds whether they are in the right place, and a lot of Newcastle sites open with a slogan rather than with what the business actually does and where.

A page per service is the one with the largest effect on search. One page covering everything competes for nothing, whereas a page about the specific thing somebody typed can rank on its own.

The four fixes, in order

• Make it load fast on a phone.

  Usually oversized images. It is often an afternoon of work rather than a project.

• Say what you do, in the first screen.

  The service and the city, in plain words, above anything else.

• Put the phone number where a thumb is.

  Tappable, visible without scrolling, on every page.

• A page per service.

  The largest job of the four and the one that keeps paying.

More than the invoice. A new site usually loses some of the search positions the old one had, and getting them back takes months.

This is the part nobody mentions when selling a rebuild. Old pages disappear, addresses change, and unless every old address is pointed at its replacement, the traffic those pages earned goes with them.

It is recoverable and it is routine work, but it has to actually be done. A rebuild delivered without redirects is the most common way a Newcastle business ends up worse off after paying for an improvement.

The other cost is time. Three months in which the effort goes into a rebuild is three months not spent on the listing, the reviews and the pages, which are what actually produce enquiries.

Listing first, then the fixes on the current site, then the pages, and a rebuild only if one of the four real reasons applies.

The listing comes first because it is free, it is fast, and it is what the map ranks. A business without a finished listing paying for a new website is spending money in the wrong order.

The site fixes come next because they are cheap and they change the rate at which visitors become enquiries, which improves everything else you do afterwards.

The pages come third because they take the longest to pay off and depend on the first two being right. A page on a slow site with a broken listing is a page nobody sees.

Whose name the domain is in, who holds the hosting and the logins, and who is responsible for the site in eighteen months. Those three answers separate two quotes far more reliably than anything visual.

A domain sitting in a builder's own account is the hardest thing in this business to get back. It is rarely malice; it is somebody who set it up quickly years ago and has since moved on, and the business finds out at the worst possible moment.

The year-two question is the one nobody asks. A great many local sites were built well and then quietly abandoned, and they do not break, they just stop being current: wrong hours, a service no longer offered, a copyright date that gives away the year everything stopped.

That matters because those details are exactly what a stranger uses to decide whether a business is still trading. A site that looks two years old reads as a business that might not answer the phone.

Ask every quote these four, and get the answers in writing

• Whose name is the domain in?

  It should be the business's, and you should have seen the account.

• Who holds the hosting and the logins?

  Same answer, same reason.

• What does a change cost after launch?

  A real number and a real turnaround, not goodwill.

• Who is responsible for it in eighteen months?

  If nobody has said, nobody has thought about it.

If the site loads reasonably on a phone, says what the business does in the first screen and has the phone number reachable in one tap, the problem is usually not the site. Replacing it will not move anything and it will cost the most.

The three faults that genuinely justify a rebuild are structural: it cannot be edited without the original builder, it is slow in a way no plugin fixes, or it was never built to be found and has no page for anything the business actually sells.

Everything else on the usual list is a repair. Dated look, wrong colours, awkward menu, missing service page, no enquiry form: all of those are days of work on an existing site rather than months on a new one.

The test worth applying is simple and unkind. Ask what specifically will be different about the enquiries after the rebuild. If the answer is about how it looks, the rebuild is being sold on taste rather than on outcome.

There is one more circumstance that genuinely forces a rebuild and it has nothing to do with the site. If the business has changed what it sells, who it sells to, or the name above the door, the old site is describing a business that no longer exists, and no amount of repair fixes a site that is accurate about the wrong company.