Plenty of trade and service businesses around Sheffield had a website built years ago, by a mate, a relative or a firm that has since stopped answering emails. It went live, it looked fine, and nobody has thought much about it since. Work comes in through word of mouth and repeat customers, so the site has never felt urgent.

That’s a reasonable place to be, right up until you notice that none of your enquiries mention the website. Below are the checks we’d run if a roofer, electrician, accountant or garage asked us whether their site needs replacing. Each one takes a few minutes and you can do them yourself.

1. It’s awkward on a phone

Open your site on your phone and try to do the one thing a customer wants: find out whether you do the job, then get in touch. If you have to pinch and zoom, if the phone number can’t be tapped to call, or if the menu spills off the edge of the screen, you’ve found the first problem.

A lot of people looking for a local tradesperson are on a phone, often standing next to the thing that’s broken. Google also uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking, so a poor mobile site hurts you in search as well as in front of the customer.

2. The browser says “Not secure”

Look at the address bar. If your site still loads over plain HTTP, Chrome and the other main browsers flag it as not secure. On a page with a contact form, that warning is enough to make a careful customer close the tab.

Most decent hosting now includes a certificate as standard. If yours can’t provide one, that tells you something about the hosting as well.

3. It’s slow

Load your home page on mobile data, away from the office Wi-Fi. If you’re staring at a blank or half-drawn screen, so are your customers, and some of them are already back on the search results ringing the next name.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights is free and shows Core Web Vitals scores from real visitors where it has enough data. We’ve written about how a slow site loses sales, and although that post is aimed at online shops, the same thing happens to a plumber’s contact page.

Old sites are usually slow for unglamorous reasons. Photos uploaded straight from a camera at full size. Cheap shared hosting. Plugins added one at a time over the years and never removed. Code written for how the web worked a long time ago.

4. You can’t change it yourself

Try to update your opening hours, or add a photo of a job you finished last week. If the honest answer is “email the person who built it and wait”, or nobody remembers the login, you don’t really control your own website any more.

People put up with this one longest. It’s also the one that quietly causes the rest. A site that is hard to edit never gets the new service page, the updated price guide or the fresh photos that would help it rank and convert, so it drifts further out of date every month.

5. It brings in nothing

This matters most and is the hardest to see without data. Think about when a new customer last said they found you through your website. Send yourself a message through your own contact form and check it arrives, and that it lands in an inbox someone actually reads.

If you have Google Analytics or Search Console, look at how many people visit and what they searched for to find you. If you have neither, that is a finding in itself: you have no way of knowing whether the site works.

A website that produces no enquiries isn’t harmless. Chances are someone in Crookes searched for exactly what you do this week and rang somebody else.

What a modern rebuild involves

People often picture a rebuild as starting from a blank page and a designer’s mood board. For a service business the useful work is more practical, and most of it happens before anything gets designed.

Agree what the site is for. For most trades that means phone calls and form enquiries for particular services in particular areas. We write it down at the start, because every later decision gets checked against it.

Keep what already works. If any of your old pages rank for anything, we find out which ones and point each old address at its new equivalent with a 301 redirect. That way the search visibility you’ve built carries across instead of disappearing on launch day. It’s the same discipline we use on large store migrations, scaled down to a small site.

Plan the structure. A page for each main service. Pages for the areas you really cover, each with something specific to say. An about page that a nervous customer can read before letting you into their house. Contact details on every page, with a tappable phone number at the top on mobile.

Write content you can stand behind. Real photos of real jobs, a plain explanation of what you do and how quoting works, and only the accreditations you actually hold. A short page that is true does more than a long one stuffed with keywords.

Build it fast and easy to edit. The new site should load quickly on a phone, run over HTTPS, and let you change your hours or add a job photo without ringing anyone. That comes from deliberate choices: lean pages, properly sized images, decent hosting and an editing setup made for non-technical people.

Measure from day one. Analytics, Search Console, and tracking on calls and form enquiries. In six months you should be able to see whether the site is doing its job rather than going on a feeling.

Launch carefully, then keep watching. Test every redirect, submit the new sitemap to Google, check the forms one last time, then keep an eye on errors and enquiries for the weeks after.

What it doesn’t need to be

It doesn’t need to be big. Most service businesses need fewer pages than they imagine, each one clearer. It doesn’t need animations, a blog nobody will update or a chatbot. And a focused site for a local trade is a much smaller job than an online shop with a full product catalogue, so it shouldn’t be planned like one.

If you recognise a few of these

One sign on its own might be a fix rather than a rebuild. A missing certificate or a broken form can often be sorted without starting again, and we’ll say so if that’s the case. If you’re nodding along to three or four, it’s probably time.

You can read how we approach websites for service businesses and the local SEO that goes alongside. If you’d like a straight opinion on your current site, book a call with us and have the web address to hand. We’re in Kelham Island and happy to talk it through in plain English.