Anyone who hasn’t lived under a rock for the past twenty years will know how the internet has massively evolved since the early 2000s. Back then, simply having a company website — any website — was often all we needed to stand out.
Fast forward to 2025, and you wouldn’t recognize the place. Today, our website is the digital face of our business, and if it’s stuck in the past by whatever yardstick buyers are using to measure it, we could easily be harming the potential success of the business without even realizing it.
Read on to find out why an outdated website fails to deliver results, the essential components of a modern website, and practical steps to transform your site into a powerful tool for growth.
Why an Outdated Website Hurts Your Business
An outdated website doesn’t just make you pull faces every time you see it. It can actively hurt your organization’s credibility, performance, and opportunity for growth.
1. First Impressions Matter
Social media, ads, podcasts, and YouTube videos are all very well and good. But at some point in time potential buyers are going to check out your website to see what your business is all about.
Consciously and unconsciously, they’re going to be comparing your site. Not just with the sites of your competition. But with every website they’ve visited (and still remember) based on design, interactivity, ease of navigation, and of course content. The reality is that we all judge a book by its cover. If a site it feels outdated, slow, and clunky, they’ll assume certain things about the business behind it.
- Example: Imagine landing on a website that had neon text, computer-bleep music playing, blinking GIF images, and using the Comic Sans typeface. Would you trust that business to deliver on their promise? That’ll be a no, then.
2. User Experience Drives Conversions
As internet users, we’ve lost the ability to remain patient. If we can’t find what we’re looking for in 262 attoseconds, we’ll click away and head to a competitor site faster than you can say “ADHD.”
Key Statistics:
- 88% of users are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience.
- Websites with poor UX have an average conversion rates up to 70% lower than optimized ones.
3. Search Engines Penalize Outdated Practices
It doesn’t matter what you say you are. It’s what Google says you are.
Search engines like Google change their ranking algorithms thousands of times in a year. Most of the index indicators aren’t known, but every now and again Google lets us know the kinds of things it’s looking for. The items on that list constantly change, new items are added, and the weighting each item plays in the overall rank placement changes too.
If your site isn’t following what Google (and others) see as best practices, the chances of securing prime placement on a search result are poor to non-existent.
Common SEO Issues on Old Websites
- No SSL encryption (pages served using http instead of https)
- Lack of alt tags for images, backlinks, or video content
- Keyword-stuffed or irrelevant content
- Content written by AI
- Slow page loading speeds due to unoptimized, bloated code, ‘web bling’, or images larger than a TikTok influencer’s glutes
4. Mobile Usage is King
Today over 60% of global web traffic comes from mobile devices.
Depending on the website concerned, the industry, category, and audience, more of your visitors could be viewing your website from a phone or tablet than from a laptop or desktop computer.
Just as concerning is that Google indexes your website based upon looking at it as if from a phone. It doesn’t matter if your site design, content hierarchy, navigation, and page speed are awesome on your laptop. If it sucks butt on a phone, so will your website on search results.
Signs Your Website Needs an Overhaul
We’ve been working with small businesses for the past 17 years. In our experience probably 90% of small business websites need urgent help, to the point that the site is actively preventing the business realizing its sales potential.
- Outdated Design Elements Animations that serve no purpose. Insufficient color contrast to meet WCAG guidelines. Missing visual focus indicators.
- Slow Load Times There’s zero reason why any page on your website should take longer than 3 seconds to load. If it’s an eCommerce site, the important of optimization is even greater. Google says page speed should be under two seconds. Slow page loading is probably costing you a ton of money – and you don’t even know it.
- High Bounce Rates Bounce rate means the percentage of visitors to a particular page that leave that page within a few seconds. Search engines take a high bounce rate to mean the visitor didn’t find that particular page useful. That means the next time someone asks Google a similar question, your page may be shown lower on the ranking list.
- Non-Mobile-Friendly Design In 2025 website design starts with how things look and work on a phone. Once that looks and works great, the designer and developer scale things up for larger viewports. If (for example) I have to zoom in and out on my phone to get the best out of your site, that’s not a good thing.
- Lack of Interactivity Depending on your industry and customer expectation, buyers may be looking for realtime online chat windows, interactive forms, or AI chatbots.
The Modern Website Checklist: Essentials for 2025 and Beyond
A successful website in 2025 requires more than just a fresh coat of paint, a quick going-over with the Dyson, and a squirt of Harpic under the rim.
1. Responsive Design
This shouldn’t even be a thing to mention in this day and age, yet first-hand experience has taught me otherwise. Your site should look and perform without issue, regardless of the device being used to view it.
- Pro Tip: Use any of the many online tools to verify your website pages pass the ‘mobile-friendly’ test.
2. Lightning-Fast Loading Times
If you’re snoozing, you’re losing.
Page loading speed has never been as important, and will probably increase in importance in the future. Make sure your site isn’t loading a gazillion CSS scripts before the page loads. Keep the size of your images as small as humanly possible, perhaps using one of the new image formats better suited to websites, such as WebP. Consider using website caching and a Content Delivery Network such as CloudFlare to deliver faster page loading times.
Your site should look and perform super-fast and without issue, regardless of the device being used to view it.
- Pro Tip: Use tools like GMetrix or Google’s Chrome Lighthouse extension to the Chrome web browser to test a page’s speed and whether it meets best practice guidelines.
3. Engaging Content
Website design is hard. Not because of the design or development skills needed. But because of the only thing that actually matters for any website: the content.
Too many business owners and marketers skip over spending the time it takes to craft engaging, relevant, resonant content. Yet messaging is the single most important page of the site.
Crafting copy isn’t a five minute job. It’s the result of Diagnosis and Strategy. You need to research the market, understand prospective client pain points, buying processes, and a ton of other things. Then you can start segmentation, targeting, and messaging to the various target audience groups.
Since so few small businesses know what all of that means, let alone how to do it, it’s not such a surprise that their website copy fails on so many levels.
Also consider the fact that ‘content’ (geez, how I hate that word) isn’t just about words. It can be images, videos, audio, or even interactive elements.
- Example: Instead of having a wall of text that’s going to put the reader off bothering to read it, break up the content using compelling visuals or maybe short explainer videos.
4. Advanced SEO
If your website designer isn’t ensuring the page has been search engine optimized as part of what they’re doing for you, they’re not worthy of the term. No-one in their right mind should be delivering any website to anyone without having done at least preliminary SEO across each and every page.
At the very least, each and every page of your site should have
- Keyword-optimized “description”, “h1”, and “title” attributes.
- Structured data markup for better and more accurate semantic interpretations by search engines.
- High-quality backlinks from reputable sources. One SEO-indicator thing that has remained constant for years has been search engines taking into account the number of backlinks (links that other sites have made to your page). The big caveat here is “high quality.” The third-party sites linking to your content should be reputable in the eyes of Google.
5. Enhanced Security
SSL encryption, serving pages via https rather than plain ol’ http, is an absolute necessity today. There are zero excuses for not having this in place.
Most browsers flag up sites that aren’t using https, scaring most visitors away. You’re an eCommerce site that isn’t using SSL to handle transactions? Forget it. No-one’s going to trust you with their credit card. You may as well pack up and go home.
Another often-forgotten aspect: emails. Many sites send you confirmation emails when you’ve filled in a contact form, signed-up for a newsletter, or purchased a product. That email is being sent from the website, which means you really ought to have that emailing service included in your DMARC sending policy. If you don’t have DMARC set up, that email may end up in the recipient’s spam folder – or may even get blocked from arriving at all.
6. Accessibility for All
As I mentioned earlier, your site needs to meet WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) standards. This not only broadens your addressable audience, but some say it helps from an SEO angle too.
- Features to Add: Screen-reader compatibility, alternative text attribution tags for images and video, video captions, and keyboard navigation.
How to Modernize Your Website: A Step-by-Step Guide
Step 1: Audit Your Current Website
Before you can start reviewing the design and presentation of the site, you need to understand what’s wrong.
Unless your business is website design or website development, this isn’t the time and place to think you can “roll your own” and work out what needs to be done on your own. Get a professional in.
Doing this properly is a combination of the technical (looking at analytics metrics such as bounce rates, load times, user behavior, backlink profiles, etc.) as well as things like brand guidelines, messaging tone-of-voice, keyword research, competitor analyses, and 101 things that our team sort out for clients that they don’t even tell me about.
A friendly word of advice: don’t try this at home, kids. Not only are you not going to be able to do the job as well as someone who does this for a living. You could theoretically screw things up even more than they are at the moment. This is not the time to think about saving money. This is about looking at making an investment in your business that’s going to generate awareness, visibility, reputation, and leads for your organization.
Step 2: Define Your Goals
What you want your new website to achieve? Is it more leads? Better SEO rankings? An improved brand image?
Quantify the output intent, to give some way of measuring performance. For example, maybe you want a particular page to rank on the first page of Google for a particular keyword. Maybe you want to generate X% more sales leads from the contact form on your website, compared to the previous three months, or compared to this time last year.
Step 3: Plan Your Redesign
I’ll say it again: work with a professional web designer and developer to get this done. Don’t try to do it yourself, or give it to your friend’s next-door neighbor’s niece whose only qualification is she’s got a Macbook and a Canva subscription.
A ‘real’ designer will create a “wireframe” or prototype of the new site, so you can test-drive how it looks and works before you pull the trigger.
This is the stage to try various design and presentation options, maybe A/B test some options with some clients or stakeholders. Focus on intuitive navigation, appealing visuals, and a clear call-to-action (CTA). If there are pages that you’re going to kill, the URLs of those pages need to be 301-redirected to somewhere else, so a visitor doesn’t get a 404 error when clicking on some backlink you weren’t aware existed.
Step 4: Optimize Your Content
Update everything that needs to be updated, and nothing more.
By that, I mean focus on the “money pages” – the Homepage, Product page, About Us page, and Contact page. Tweak any old blogs that could do with some TLC. Otherwise, leave well alone right now.
Why? Because otherwise the six-week website redesign project is still going to be in your in-tray this time next year. There are 101 other things that are taking up your time, and this is just one. Yes, you need to get everything ship-shape eventually. But right now, the most important thing is to launch the darn thing and backfill content afterwards.
I know the above sounds a bit wacky, but trust me on this. Not only will the site launch on time. But all those things that you want to change will suddenly become higher in your priority list, since they’re visible for everyone to see and not sitting on a password-protected prototype site somewhere.
Step 5: Test, Test, Test
Before pulling the pin, the site needs to be tested.
Everything needs to work similarly regardless of what device the site is being viewed. Similarly, things need to work on Macs as well as Windows, iOS as well as Android, and on all the main web browsers – both desktop and mobile versions.
Step 6: Monitor and Improve
The work doesn’t end once the site has gone live.
If you’ve changed the site page layout, you may want to submit a new sitemap to the major search engines, so that they’ll take into account your new layout and index the pages accordingly. You do this using Google’s Search Console, for example. Ideally you should then monitor performance, maybe using an online tool such as SEMRush or Ahrefs.
Your Site Isn’t About You. It’s About Them
Customers don’t care about what you do. They care about what you can do for them. They don’t want to hear unsubstantiated claims about how great you are, or how you’re the best at what you do, because they don’t believe you.
Your website needs to inform, advise and educate. It needs to answer the questions that are going through the mind of the visitor when they’re on your site. It then needs to tell them what they’re supposed to do next to advance the relationship. And it needs to do all of this quickly, efficiently, and independent of viewing device.
Your site should reflect your take on the bigger trends of how technology is impacting your market space, over time. Marketers and business owners should look at disruptive technology and business models. and their impact on society. It’s less about being ahead of the trends. It’s more about being aligned with them, creating the right environment and infrastructure to follow it. Technology is only part of the solution; the other part is perspective.
Today, the tools and expertise to get your site to where it needs to be have never been more accessible, or affordable. You really have no excuse.