Your website is ten years old: what has changed since then

A website built ten years ago was made for an internet that has since moved on. Phones became the main way people look up a local business, browsers started warning visitors about sites without a padlock, photos got bigger while patience got shorter, and contact forms became targets for spam robots. The good news is that the part that matters most, what you do, where and how to reach you, has not changed, and your old site may still say it well.

Phones went from a second thought to the main screen

Ten years ago many small business sites were designed on a desktop computer for desktop computers. A phone version, if there was one, was a separate, stripped-down "mobile site", or the full page shrunk down so customers had to pinch and zoom.

Today a customer standing in their kitchen with a dripping pipe, or in a parking lot looking for lunch, looks you up on their phone. They expect:

Text they can read without zooming.
A phone number they can tap to call.
A menu that opens with one tap and closes again.
Buttons big enough for a thumb, not tiny links.
Directions that open in their maps app.

If your site still needs pinching, it is the single biggest thing that has aged. Why old websites look bad on phones explains the reasons.

The padlock became the norm

Ten years ago, the padlock in the address bar, which means the connection is encrypted (HTTPS), was mostly something shops and banks had. Since then the major browsers have started showing "Not secure" next to sites without it, especially on pages with a form. Certificates, which used to cost money, are now commonly issued free by hosts and site builders.

A customer who sees "Not secure" next to your contact form may simply not fill it in. Check your own site now: open it and look left of the address. HTTPS and the padlock covers what to do if it is missing.

Speed expectations went up

Phone cameras now take very large photos, and older sites often show them at full size, which makes pages slow on mobile data. At the same time, people have grown used to pages that appear almost instantly. A site that was quick on an office connection in 2016 can feel sluggish today on a phone with two bars of signal.

Old sites also tend to carry extra weight: big sliders that cycle five photos, background videos, many plugins each loading its own files. You can see how yours does at PageSpeed Insights.

Contact forms became spam magnets

Robots now fill in website forms by the thousand. Old forms with no protection get flooded with junk, and the real messages get buried. Some older forms also send email in a way modern inboxes treat as suspicious, so genuine enquiries land in spam or never arrive.

If your inbox is full of nonsense form messages, or customers say "I sent you a message" and you never saw it, your form has aged too. Stopping spam from your contact form explains the fixes.

Bits of the old internet quietly broke

Some things that were normal on a site ten years ago now show as blank boxes or errors:

Flash animations and intros. Browsers stopped running Flash altogether in early 2021.
Social widgets: old Facebook "Like" boxes, Twitter feeds and Google+ buttons. Google+ itself closed for consumers in 2019.
Embedded maps set up with an old method that now needs a key, showing "This page can't load Google Maps correctly".
Visitor counters, guestbooks, "best viewed in Internet Explorer" notes.
Old software. A WordPress site that has not been updated in years, with plugins nobody maintains, is a real security risk, not just a cosmetic one.

Customers expect to see more before they call

People have become used to checking a business carefully before they get in touch, especially for work in their home. Things that were optional ten years ago are now what customers look for:

Photos of your actual work and your actual team, not stock photos.
Reviews, or at least a link to your Google reviews.
Your service area, spelled out.
Some idea of price, or at least how pricing works.
Proof you are real and licensed: a license number, years in business, a street address or the towns you cover.
Current hours, including holidays.

What has not changed

Not everything needs replacing. If your old site explained your services clearly in your own words, those words may still be the best part of it. Your business name, your phone number, your domain and the addresses of your existing pages are also worth keeping: customers and Google already know them. A sensible redesign keeps what still works and replaces the container around it.

A ten-minute check of your ten-year-old site

Open it on your phone. Can you read it without zooming?
Look for the padlock in the address bar.
Tap your phone number. Does it dial?
Send yourself a message through the form. Does it arrive?
Look for blank boxes, broken maps or dead social widgets.
Read the home page. Is everything still true: services, hours, area, staff?
Check the footer year.
Run it through PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile result.

If several of these fail, a redesign will likely pay off. If most pass, small fixes may be enough; refresh versus full redesign helps you decide. Either way, you can see your site rebuilt first from the words and photos already on it, and compare it with what you have before you spend anything.