You can tell whether a website is dated by measuring seventeen specific things on the homepage, not by deciding whether it looks tired. Four of them matter far more than the rest: Adobe Flash, a missing mobile viewport tag, no HTTPS, and a layout that breaks sideways on a phone. Hit all four and a site is at 90 out of 100 before anything else is counted.

Most advice on this subject is a list of things nobody can act on — "outdated fonts", "cluttered layout", "looks like it was built five years ago". That is taste dressed as diagnosis. You cannot fix a font because a stranger finds it dated, and you certainly should not spend a few thousand pounds on the strength of it.

So here is ours, in full, with the weights. It is the same scale we run before we ever contact anybody, and we are publishing it because a measurement you can check yourself is worth more than an opinion you have to take on trust.

The four that actually matter

Adobe Flash on the homepage — 30 points. Every browser switched Flash off in December 2020. Whatever that element was meant to show has been an empty rectangle to every visitor since, for years, and nobody has mentioned it. It is the single clearest sign that no one is looking after the site.

No mobile viewport tag — 25 points. Without it the site is not responsive at all: on a phone it renders as a shrunken desktop page. Google indexes the mobile version of a site, so this is not only about how it looks to a visitor.

Not served over HTTPS — 20 points. Browsers label the site "Not secure" to every visitor who arrives, and it works against search ranking. This is also the cheapest of the four to fix.

The layout breaks sideways on a phone — 15 points. Visitors have to pinch and scroll horizontally just to read a sentence, which is the fastest way to lose them.

The middle group

Slow to load — 12 points. Over five seconds. Every extra second costs visitors before they have seen anything at all.

Genuinely old technology under the bonnet — 10 points. Internet Explorer conditionals, long-dead analytics, XHTML, image maps. It means the site cannot be maintained safely or cheaply, so it is a security liability as much as a look.

Fixed-width layout — 9 points. The content sits in a narrow column using less than 72% of a large screen, with empty space either side. It is the clearest single tell of a pre-2015 build.

The eight-pointers, which are mostly about being found

  • No social share image. Every time anyone shares the site on LinkedIn it renders as a bare grey link instead of a branded card.
  • No meta description. Google writes its own snippet, so the first thing a searcher reads about the business is not the business's own words.
  • No contact form anywhere on the homepage. Interested buyers have nowhere to land, and enquiries leak away.
  • Images missing alt text. An accessibility problem and a search problem at once. We scale this one by how many images are affected rather than treating one lapse the same as forty.

The small ones, which add up

  • Stale copyright year (6). Minor in itself, but it makes a site feel unattended.
  • JavaScript errors in the console (6). Something is broken — often a form or a menu — and nobody has been told.
  • Phone number not tappable (5). On a phone, a number you cannot tap is a number that does not get called.
  • Body text under 14px (5). Harder to read, and it reads as dated. Current sites sit around 16 to 18px.
  • No H1 heading (4). Search engines cannot tell what the page is about.
  • A rotating carousel (4). They test badly; visitors rarely see past the first slide. A hallmark of a mid-2010s template.

What the total means

The points add up and cap at 100. The bands we use:

  • 75–100 — critical. Embarrassing for the size of the business.
  • 50–74 — poor. Clearly dated, and costing enquiries.
  • 30–49 — tired but working. Worth improving, not necessarily worth replacing.
  • Under 30 — fine. Leave it alone.

For calibration: stripe.com scores 21 on this scale — comfortably in the "leave it alone" band, which is roughly what you would hope a scale is doing if it says a well-built modern site is well built.

The rule we hold ourselves to

If a site scores under 30, we do not contact that business. Not a softer pitch — no pitch. A web company publishing the threshold at which it stops trying to sell you a website is unusual, and it is the part of this we would most like you to hold us to.

The same discipline applies inside the scoring: if we did not measure something, we cannot say it. The wording of any review we send is assembled only from signals that actually came back positive, which means every sentence is a fact the recipient can check on their own site. That is structural rather than a promise about our good intentions.

Checking the big four yourself, without any tools

  1. HTTPS: look at the address bar. If it says "Not secure", that is 20 points and usually a quick fix.
  2. Mobile: open the site on your phone. If it arrives as a tiny full desktop page, or you have to scroll sideways, that is 25 or 15 points.
  3. Flash: look for a blank rectangle where something was clearly meant to be. That is 30 points on its own.
  4. Width: open it on the largest screen you have. If the content huddles in a narrow strip down the middle, that is 9 points and a strong hint at the build's age.

Those four take about two minutes and cover most of the scale. If none of them applies, your site is probably in better shape than the internet would like you to believe.

If you want the full seventeen run against your own site, we do that free and you keep the result whether or not you ever work with us. If it comes back under 30 we will tell you so and go away. And if you are weighing up what a replacement would actually cost, we publish our prices rather than making you ask.