Do You Need a Full Website Upgrade or a Few Key Fixes?

Do We Need a Website Upgrade or Just a Few Fixes?

Ask Pam the receptionist what she wishes you’d fix on the website. You might hear, “The membership renewal page. I send people that link three times a day.” Ask Jim in sales, and you’ll probably get a completely different answer. He’s got a campaign ready for January and no good place on the site to send anyone who clicks. That’s a sampling. Across the organization, there will be lots of other suggestions.

Either complaint is a better starting point for your 2027 website budget than “Our site is five years old.” The renewal link might take an afternoon to fix. The campaign might expose a bigger problem with how your site presents your services.

These ten signs can help you decide what to fix now and where a larger website upgrade would pay off.

1. Your best sales pitch is missing from the site

Think about the work you most want to win in 2027. Could a prospective customer tell from your homepage that you do this kind of work? A commercial builder might be bidding on laboratory projects while its website still leads with a history of office renovations. Its sales team has photographs of a completed lab and a good story about keeping the facility open during construction. But a facilities director visiting the website sees none of it. That disconnect can cost sales.

You can put the presentation your sales team actually uses beside the page they’d send a prospect. What makes it into every sales conversation but never onto the page? Start there. For that builder, one well-told project story, linked from the homepage and the relevant service page, would give the sales team something worth sending after the next meeting.

No matter what industry you’re in, these sorts of gaps between a constantly changing organization and its website routinely cause confusion and hurt opportunities.

2. People call to ask where something is

“Where do I renew?” is an easy call to handle. It’s also an easy problem to overlook, because the staff member who emails the link considers the matter settled. For a week, have Pam jot down the questions callers ask in their own words. If six people ask how to renew and the link lives under “Member Resources,” try putting a link labeled “Renew Your Membership” where members sign in.

Sometimes the whole menu asks visitors to know too much about your organization. When New Target redesigned the website for Catholic Charities, we made “Find Help” and “Give Help” two prominent starting points. Someone looking for food assistance can start with “Find Help” without knowing which department runs the program.

3. Customers say they’ll finish on their laptop

You have a conference invitation in front of a great prospect; what can go wrong? A member opens your conference invitation on the train, chooses a session, and gets halfway through registration. The date picker won’t close. By the time she’s back at her desk, your email is fourteen messages down.

Try this trip yourself that you’ve given them to do. Start from the invitation on your phone and follow it all the way through a test registration, including any pages run by an outside provider. Try correcting a mistake, too. Does going back to change your ticket type wipe out everything you’ve entered? Tell your web team which phone and browser you used, point out the step that failed, and include a screenshot. That gives them a much better lead than “mobile needs work.” Little fixes that eliminate friction will do wonders for the bottom line.

4. Visitors have to wait before they can do anything

A donation page can look as though it has loaded and still leave someone waiting. Waiting even a few seconds in our current environment means something is possibly wrong, maybe even it’s a security issue. Imagine a donor who opens your year-end appeal, reads the first paragraph, and taps “Give Now.” Nothing happens. A moment later, the donation form appears, by which time the donor has tapped the button twice and is wondering whether something went wrong.

Open the pages you’re paying to promote on your phone using cellular data. Pay attention to when you can actually take the next step. If the story appears promptly but the giving form takes its time, ask your web team to check whether the delay comes from the page itself or from the service that supplies the form. That tells you who can fix it. If a large video touting the great work that you are asking money for delays every campaign page, changing the shared template could improve a whole season’s worth of appeals.

5. People start the form and disappear

Your admissions team is getting plenty of visits to a program page and then very few requests for information. If your reporting tracks form starts and submissions, compare the two. Then send a test inquiry and ask someone in admissions to confirm it arrived. Did it reach the person responsible for following up? A form people abandon, and a form that quietly sends inquiries to an old inbox can look exactly alike from the admissions desk.

Once you know submissions are getting through, read the questions as a prospective student would. Why do you need my employer’s name when all I want is next semester’s schedule? What happens if I don’t have a work email? Ask the person who follows up which answers they need for that first conversation. Save the rest for a point when the visitor has a good reason to provide them. Frictionless forms result in more forms being sent in. 

6. A visitor needs a mouse to use your site

Put your mouse aside and try to reach your contact form with just the keyboard. As you press Tab, can you see which link or field is selected? Open the main menu, choose an item, and try to move on. A highlight that vanishes halfway across the navigation might seem like a small design flaw. For someone who relies on a keyboard, it can mean losing their place on every page.

A useful report is as specific as “I can open the event menu, but I can’t get out of it.” Give that to the person who maintains the site. If the same menu appears everywhere, a repair in one place can remove a barrier across the whole site. Ask your team to check the rest of that task as well, including the registration form the menu leads to.

7. Changing a date requires a developer

Let’s say your conference deadline moves from Friday to Monday. Your events manager updates the event page, but the old date also appears in a homepage banner that only a developer can edit. Then someone remembers the registration page. For the rest of the afternoon, the answer to “Can I still register?” depends on which page an attendee happens to read.

Sit with the person who makes those edits and watch one from beginning to end. If they know exactly what to change but can’t access it, a change in editing permissions may solve the problem. If they’re typing the same date in three places, have your developer make the event record the source for all three. That’s a website upgrade your marketing team will appreciate every time a deadline moves.

8. Someone on staff is the link between two systems

Follow a request for a quote after the visitor hits Submit. It might arrive in a shared inbox, where an office manager copies the details into a spreadsheet and emails the right salesperson. That arrangement can work well enough that nobody questions it. What happens when the office manager takes a week off and a promising inquiry sits until Thursday?

Pick a recent inquiry and trace how long it took to reach someone who could answer it. If the delay was deciding who should get it, your team needs an assignment rule. If the rule is already clear and someone spends every morning moving records around, that’s a good case for connecting the website to your sales system. Decide who will notice and follow up if a submission ever fails to arrive.

9. The website looks like it belongs to your old organization

Open your latest proposal, your annual report, and your homepage side by side. Maybe the proposal introduces a regional firm with three offices, while the website shows the original storefront and describes the company as a neighborhood business. Picture a prospect who just heard your team present. What would they make of the company they find when they look you up?

Check the less prominent pages, too. A search for a specific service might take a buyer straight to a page with an old logo, a former employee’s bio, or a project photo from a line of work you’ve left behind. If the outdated material is limited to a few pages, give an editor the list and find out what it would take to bring them up to date. When the old identity is built into every layout, price a design refresh that carries the current brand through the site.

10. Your platform has a support deadline

Some upgrade decisions come with a date. Drupal 10, for example, reaches end of life on December 9, 2026. After that date, the Drupal project will issue no further Drupal 10 releases, including security updates. Your homepage can look perfectly fine while the software behind it reaches the end of its supported life. 

If that deadline applies to you, put one question to your web partner now. What needs to happen between today and the day our upgraded site goes live? Get a target date, a person responsible, and time to test the things your visitors depend on, such as logging in, paying dues, or making a donation. You can give the software upgrade its own budget and schedule while you consider whether the design needs work. Maybe this is the occasion to do a bigger website overhaul.