Notes from the workbench.

Instagram is a rental. Facebook is a rental. Google Business is a rental. Your website is the one piece of digital ground you actually own — and in 2026, it's where a customer decides in about eight seconds whether you're worth their money.

The businesses I see thriving locally aren't the ones with the biggest ad budgets. They're the ones whose sites load instantly, tell you the price without a form, and show a phone number above the fold. That's not a design trend. That's respect.

If a competitor two blocks over has a site that loads in one second and yours loads in five, they're winning about half of your search traffic before anyone reads a single word. It doesn't matter how good your service is if people never get to it.

Some sites can be nursed along with a few tweaks. Others need to be put down. Here are five signs it's the latter:

1. It doesn't look right on your phone — because half your visitors are on one.
2. You can't remember the last time it was updated. If you can't, neither can Google.
3. It takes more than three seconds to load. That's a customer lost per second.
4. You dread sending people to it. Trust your gut here.
5. The person who built it is unreachable. Every site needs a phone number attached to it.

If two or more of these apply, a redesign will pay for itself in a quarter.

Every extra second your site takes to load, about 10% more visitors bounce. That's not a design opinion — it's measured, repeatedly, by Google and everyone else who watches this stuff.

The reason template-based sites are slow is not that the templates are lazy. It's that they ship every possible feature to every visitor, so a plumber in Ohio downloads the same 400 KB of JavaScript that an e-commerce site needs. Hand-coded sites skip everything the page doesn't use.

My sites target a Lighthouse performance score of 95 or higher. That's not for me to feel good — that's the difference between a customer clicking your phone number and them clicking the next result.