Website not updating, slow or unsupported: how to find the real fault

The call we get most often opens with a version of the same sentence: our website looks dated. By the time we have had a proper look, that is rarely the worst thing wrong with it. Something else has usually been broken for months, and nobody at the agency knew, because a broken website does not tell you it is broken. It carries on looking like a website. It just quietly does less.

So before you commission anything, spend an hour finding out which fault you have got. There are four. They overlap, they get blamed on each other, and only one of them genuinely needs a new website.

Fault one: the listings are wrong, and nobody has noticed

This is the most expensive fault and the least visible, for a simple reason. You look at your CRM all day. You look at your own website almost never.

Feeds do not usually fail loudly. They drift. A launch does not appear. A sold one lingers for a fortnight. The price change you made on Tuesday is still not showing on Friday. Images go missing from one property and nowhere else. Every one of those is small enough to miss and large enough to matter, because the person seeing it is a vendor checking their own house, or a buyer deciding whether you are worth ringing. Ten minutes settles it.

• Count. Live sales and lettings instructions in the CRM, against the number on your website. They should match today, not roughly, not allowing for a couple.
• Test the newest. Take an instruction you launched in the last 48 hours and search for it on your own site.
• Test the oldest. Take something you sold or withdrew last week and check it has gone.
• Compare like for like. Open one of your listings on your website next to the same listing on Rightmove. Price, status, photo count, description, floorplan.

Then ask the question that tells you whose fault it is. Is the portal right and your website wrong? If Rightmove has the property and your site does not, your CRM did its job and the failure sits between the feed and the website, which is your web company's problem to fix. If neither has it, the trouble is further upstream in the CRM or in how that property was saved, and no website supplier on earth can fix it for you.

It is worth being blunt about why this matters beyond tidiness. A stale property page is a page making a claim about somebody's house that is not true any more, and the material information rules do not care that a feed hiccuped. Those pages are also what Google and the AI engines read when they decide what to say about you.

Fault two: it is slow

Slow is not a feeling. It is measurable, it is free to measure, and almost everybody measures the wrong page.

Test a property detail page, not the homepage. Your homepage is the page you look at; property pages are where your buyers actually land, arriving from a portal, a Google result or a link somebody sent their partner. Paste a property URL into Google's PageSpeed Insights and read the field data at the top, the part drawn from real visitors, rather than only the lab score underneath. The lab score is a simulation on a modelled phone. The field data is your buyers, on their phones, on their networks.

Two follow-up questions narrow it down fast. Is it slow for everyone or only on mobile? And is it slow all the time, or slow at seven in the evening when everybody browses? Slow all the time points at how the site is built. Slow at the busy hour points at where it is hosted.

The usual causes, in the order we find them: photographs uploaded at full camera size and shrunk in the browser rather than before upload, too many plugins each loading its own code on every page, hosting shared with hundreds of other sites, and no caching worth the name. Three of those four are fixable on the website you already own. If you want the detail on what Google is actually measuring, the Core Web Vitals piece covers it without the jargon.

Fault three: nobody is answering

This is the one agents are slowest to say out loud, and it covers a wide range. A supplier who used to reply in an hour and now takes three weeks. A one-person outfit whose one person has moved on to something else. A company that has quietly stopped trading and never got round to mentioning it. Sometimes it is not neglect at all, just a business that grew and left you at the bottom of a queue.

It feels like a nuisance. It is actually the urgent one, and here is why. An unmaintained website is an unpatched website. The software underneath it gets security updates for a reason, those updates are published in public, and the people looking for vulnerable sites read the same announcements you could. A site nobody has touched for two years is a site with a list of known ways in. Meanwhile that same site is collecting names, phone numbers and email addresses through every enquiry and valuation form on it, and responsibility for that data sits with your agency, not with whoever built the thing.

So find out where you stand before something makes you find out. Four questions, and you can answer two of them yourself in the next five minutes.

• Who is our domain registered to? A public whois lookup will usually tell you the registrant. If it is your web company rather than your agency, deal with that first, quietly, before you have any other conversation.
• Do we hold the logins? Hosting, domain, content management, analytics. Not "they would give them to us if we asked". Do you have them.
• When was the site's software last updated? If nobody can answer, that is the answer.
• Who do we ring on a Saturday when the feed stops? Ask for a name.

If those answers are uncomfortable, you are not stuck. Our guide to switching website provider covers the leaving properly: what you own, how the domain moves, and how to change supplier without losing the Google standing you have spent years building.

Fault four: it looks dated

The one that makes people pick up the phone, and the least urgent of the four. Which is not the same as saying it does not matter. A dated website gets read as a signal about the agency behind it, and the two questions it prompts are unhelpful ones: are they still trading, and are they going to be organised about my sale.

The useful thing is to separate dated from broken, because they need different money. Open your site on your own phone, cold, the way a stranger would, and try four things. Can you get to a valuation request in two taps from any page you land on? Does the property search work one-handed, with a thumb, on a train? Is there a year in the footer, and is it this one? And read the first sentence on your homepage: does it say something only your agency could say, or would any agent's logo sit above it comfortably?

If those all come out fine and the site simply is not to current taste, you have a design refresh, and it can wait behind the other three. If they come out badly, dated was the symptom rather than the disease, and the mobile experience piece is the place to start.

The order to fix them in

It is close to the reverse of the order you notice them.

• Listings wrong: today. It is costing you enquiries and telling vendors something untrue about their own house.
• Nobody answering: this week. It blocks every other fix, and it is the one with a security question attached.
• Slow: this month. Measure first. Three of the four usual causes do not need a new website.
• Dated: after the other three. Then do it properly rather than twice.

What a rebuild actually fixes

A new website fixes faults one, two and four, and it fixes them permanently rather than for six months. It fixes fault three only if the supplier you choose is one who answers, and that is the single thing you cannot see from the sales call. So ask about the exit before you ask about the design. Ask who picks up on a Saturday. Ask for a client whose feed once broke, and how that went.

And if all you have is fault one, say so out loud. A feed that has stopped talking to a website is a fault to be fixed, not a reason to buy a whole new website. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling.