If you invested in a website many years ago, it's only natural that it no longer matches what's expected today. Technology and habits have moved fast: a site designed for a computer screen, with menus that only work with a mouse and small text, is hard work for anyone arriving on a phone.
And it's on a phone that most people arrive. A site that forces you to zoom in to read, hides the contact button, or takes too long to load on a mobile network loses visitors before it's even explained what the company does. That means fewer enquiries, fewer sales, and more money wasted on advertising that sends people somewhere they can't actually use.
There's a less visible effect too: Google assesses and indexes sites based on their mobile version. If that version is worse than the desktop one — or doesn't exist — it's the worse version that counts.
1. Assess the current site before touching anything
Before deciding anything, it's worth understanding what's already there. Open the site on your phone and try to do what a customer would: find the price, work out where the company is, send a message. Wherever you hesitate, so does someone who doesn't know the company.
Then look at the data: what percentage of visits arrive on mobile, which pages get the most views, and where people give up. It often turns out the problem sits in two or three pages, not the whole site.
2. Make the site adapt to any screen
A responsive site is one that adjusts itself to the size and orientation of the screen: the text reflows, the columns stack, the menu transforms and the images follow suit. It isn't a separate version for mobile — it's the same site, with a single address, behaving differently depending on the space available.
There are details that make all the difference and are easy to overlook: buttons big enough for a thumb, forms with the right keyboard for each field, clickable phone numbers, and nothing that depends on hovering a mouse. That's UX/UI work before it's ever development work.
3. Fix the speed
Nobody waits for a slow page, and on a mobile network patience is even shorter. The causes repeat themselves: images far larger than the space they're shown in, too many plugins, too many typefaces, and external services loading before the content does.
Fixing this improves two things at once: the visitor's experience and search engine performance, where speed is taken into account. It's one of the first things we look at when we work on SEO for an existing site.
Update or rebuild?
If the site's structure still works and the content is up to date, it's often worth adapting what's there. If the site was built with technology that no longer gets security updates, if nobody can edit the content without help, or if the information no longer matches what the company does, rebuilding works out cheaper than patching.
Either way, one rule can't be skipped: keep the page addresses, or redirect them properly to the new ones. That's how you avoid throwing away the ranking you've already earned. If you're thinking about moving forward, see how we approach websites and web pages.
Want to know what state your site is in?
Send us the address and what's already bothering you about it. We'll tell you whether it's worth adapting or rebuilding, and with what scope.