Your website works, more or less. It is slow on a phone, the browser says "Not secure", nobody has updated it for years, and the person who built it no longer answers. The question is whether to fix it or start again. Both answers can be right, and choosing wrongly costs either money (a new site you did not need) or time (patching a site that cannot be saved). This guide gives you five checks you can do yourself in an afternoon, and explains what each result means for the decision.
If your main problem is speed, our checklist for a slow small-business website goes through the fixes in order of impact. This article is about the decision that comes before it.
#Check 1: does it work on a phone at all?
Open the site on your phone. If you have to pinch and zoom to read the text, the page was built for desktop screens only. Technically, it is usually missing the viewport tag, which tells the phone to fit the page to the screen.
This check matters more than any other, because it decides the cost. Adding the tag to an old fixed-width layout normally breaks the layout, and rebuilding the layout is most of the work of a new site. A site that already adapts to a phone can usually be repaired; one that does not usually cannot be repaired cheaply.
#Check 2: what software does it run on?
Most small-business sites run on a content management system such as WordPress or Joomla, which runs on PHP on the server. Two questions:
- Which PHP version does the hosting use? You can see it in the hosting panel. PHP 8.1 and every older version no longer receive security fixes. PHP 8.2 receives them until 31 December 2026, so a site on 8.2 needs to move this year. WordPress itself recommends PHP 8.3 or newer.
- Can the CMS, theme and plugins be updated? If the theme or a key plugin was abandoned by its author years ago, it may stop working on a current PHP version. That is the most common reason a "simple update" turns into a rebuild.
If everything can be updated, a repair is realistic. If the site depends on an abandoned theme or a custom plugin nobody can maintain, compare the cost of replacing those parts with the cost of a new site.
#Check 3: is it secure?
- Does the address bar show a padlock, and does
http://redirect tohttps://? - Does the site show anything you did not put there: strange links in the footer, pages in other languages, redirects to other sites on a phone? These are typical signs of an infection.
- Does it still contain Flash, which no browser has run since its end of life on 31 December 2020?
HTTPS problems and known infections can be fixed on an existing site. A site that keeps getting reinfected usually has an outdated component that cannot be updated, which brings you back to check 2.
#Check 4: how heavy is it?
Run PageSpeed Insights on the home page in the mobile view and note the performance score, the Largest Contentful Paint and the page weight. Heavy images, too many scripts and missing caching are all fixable on the existing site, and are often the bulk of a repair.
#Check 5: is the content still right?
Read the site as a new customer would. Are the services, prices, team, address and opening hours current? Does the contact form reach an inbox someone reads? If most of the text needs rewriting anyway, the content work is the same either way, and a new site may cost only a little more than repairing the old one.
#How to read the results
Repair when the site adapts to a phone, its software can be updated, and the content is mostly right. A repair keeps your addresses, your search positions and your content, and it is fast.
Rebuild when the site does not work on a phone, depends on software that cannot be updated, or needs its content rewritten anyway. Rebuild with the same addresses where you can, or add redirects from the old addresses, so you do not lose the search traffic the old site earned.
In between, a repair can buy time. Fixing HTTPS, updates and images now and planning a new site for next year is a perfectly reasonable choice for a small business.
#What we do in each case
Our site rescue and speed fix costs €190 for sites up to 10 pages, paid in full after you receive the report; WooCommerce shops and larger sites start at €290. It starts with a full backup, works on a copy where the host allows it, and covers the HTTPS certificate and redirect, updates of the core, theme and plugins (or a written list of what cannot be updated safely), a malware scan and clean-up of known infections, image compression, caching and lazy loading, mobile fixes on the key pages, a test of the contact form, and a before and after report. It takes 3 to 5 working days after we receive access.
When a repair does not make sense, our business website package starts at €590; what a small-business website costs explains what moves that price. And if you would rather have someone else do the five checks, the free website check gives you a one-page report within 2 working days, with three concrete fixes and the price of each. We need no access to your site for it.
#Frequently asked questions
Will I lose my Google positions with a new site?
Not if the important addresses stay the same or redirect permanently (301) to their new versions. Most lost traffic after a relaunch comes from old pages that suddenly answer "not found".
Can a site be repaired without access to the hosting?
A real repair needs access to the site's admin and usually to the hosting panel, at least through a temporary user. The free check, by contrast, is done from the outside and needs no access.
The developer who built my site is gone. Is that a problem?
Only if the domain, hosting or admin accounts are in their name. Recover those first; see who owns the code and the accounts.
Is a repair worth it if I plan a new site next year?
Often yes, when the site is insecure or broken on phones today. A year of a working, safe site is worth more than the repair costs, and the content you fix now moves to the new site.
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