Redesign or fix? Small changes that make an old site work better

You can often improve an old website a great deal without redesigning it. A tappable phone number, correct hours, a working form, fewer dead pages and smaller photos fix most of what customers actually complain about. Try the quick fixes first. If you cannot make them, because the site is locked, broken on phones or too old to edit, that is your answer: the site needs rebuilding, not patching.

Can you edit your site at all?

Everything below assumes you can log in and change text. Find out first.

Do you know where the site is hosted or which builder it is on? If not, how to find who hosts your website walks through it.
Do you have the login? If the person who built it has vanished, getting access comes before anything else.
When you log in, can you change a sentence and see it on the live site within a few minutes?

If any answer is no and getting it would take weeks, put the small fixes aside and read the section on when to rebuild.

Fixes that take under an hour each

Work down this list on a quiet afternoon. Check each change on your phone after you make it.

Make the phone number a link

On a phone, a customer should be able to tap your number to call. On many old sites the number is plain text or, worse, part of a picture. In most editors you can turn it into a link by entering tel: followed by the number, with no spaces, as the link address. Our guide on making your phone number tappable shows the steps.

Correct anything out of date

Read every page for facts that have changed: hours, prices, staff names, services you dropped, a town you no longer serve, an old address. Visitors forgive an old design much faster than wrong information.

Remove the dead weight

Old sites collect clutter. Delete or hide:

News or blog posts from years ago that make the site look abandoned, unless they still answer useful questions.
Event pages for events that are over.
"Under construction" or "coming soon" pages.
Links to a Twitter account, guestbook or forum you no longer use.

Before deleting a page that has been up for years, check whether other pages link to it, and ask your web person to forward its address to a related page.

Update the year and the copyright line

Replace the worst photo

Pick the single weakest picture near the top of the home page, often a blurry or stock image, and swap it for a sharp, recent photo of your work, your shop or your team.

Fixes that take an afternoon

Test and repair the contact form

Send a message through the form from your own phone. If it does not reach you within a few minutes, find out where it goes and change the address to one you read every day. Remove any field you do not need to reply.

Shrink oversized photos

Old sites often load photos straight from a camera, several megabytes each, which makes pages crawl on a phone. Resizing them to a sensible width before uploading can make the site noticeably faster. Our guide on making images smaller explains how with free tools. You can see whether speed is a problem by entering your address at pagespeed.web.dev.

Check the padlock

Open your site and look at the address bar. If the browser says "Not secure", your site lacks a security certificate, which most hosts now provide at no extra charge. Ask your host to switch it on.

Rewrite the top of the home page

Look at what someone sees before scrolling. It should say what you do and where, in plain words, with your phone number and one button. "Welcome to our website" can go. "Family-run auto repair in Tulsa since 1998. Call 555-0177" does the job.

Signs a fix is not enough

Some problems cannot be patched with small edits. A rebuild is the better use of your money when:

The site does not adjust to phones. If visitors have to pinch and zoom to read, the layout itself is the problem; why your old website looks bad on phones explains why.
You cannot edit it, because the builder is discontinued, the software is years out of date, or only one person who no longer answers can make changes.
It has been hacked, or keeps showing security warnings.
Every fix breaks something else, which is common on old WordPress sites with many add-ons.
The business has changed so much that most pages would need rewriting anyway: new services, new name, new area.
Small edits cost money each time, so you avoid making them and the site drifts further out of date.

A middle path

Between patching and starting fresh, there is a rebuild that keeps what works. If your words, services and photos are mostly right but the site is slow, awkward on phones or hard to change, a rebuild from your existing site carries over the content and page addresses while replacing the old machinery underneath. Our guide on a refresh versus a full redesign helps you tell which you need.

What to do this week

Confirm you can log in and change a sentence.
Tap your phone number on your phone. Fix it if it does not dial.
Read every page for wrong facts and correct them.
Send a test message through the form.
Run your address through PageSpeed Insights and note whether it flags large images.
Write down anything you wanted to fix but could not. If that list is long, a rebuild is probably cheaper than fighting the old site.

If you are leaning toward a rebuild but want to see the result before committing, you can see your site rebuilt first and compare it with your patched old one.