A satisfied client recommends you. The person they spoke to types your company name into their phone, opens your site, closes it again. They will not call you, and you will never know they came by.
A website does not break down on the day it becomes a liability. It still loads. It simply sorts: some visitors leave without a word. Here are six symptoms that have nothing to do with taste, and for each one a test you can run yourself. Set aside half an hour, your phone and a sheet of paper: six lines, two columns — what is wrong, and who can fix it.
It is unreadable on a phone
In Switzerland, across all sites, phones account for around four page views in ten. That is a ballpark figure. If you have an analytics tool, look at your own split: that is the only one that matters.
The test. Open your site on your phone, in portrait. You should be able to read without zooming, never scroll left to right, and hit every button with your thumb first time. Then hand the phone to someone who has never seen the site: ask them to find your phone number. Past about fifteen seconds, the problem is not with them.
Since July 2024, Google has been crawling sites with its mobile crawler, and content that is entirely inaccessible from a phone risks dropping out of the index. A site that is still readable stays indexed, but it starts at a disadvantage.
If this test fails, it is almost never a matter of settings: a site built for a desktop screen has to be rebuilt.
It takes too long to appear
The test. Go to pagespeed.web.dev, paste your site address, read the Mobile tab. The main marker is called LCP: the time it takes for the largest visible element to appear. The “good” threshold is under 2.5 seconds. Two others complete the picture: INP (responsiveness to a click, 200 milliseconds) and CLS (the page moving about while it loads, 0.1).
These thresholds are measured on real visits, at the 75th percentile — setting aside the slowest quarter of visits. A small local site often lacks the traffic for that data to exist; the tool then shows only a lab measurement. Beyond four or five seconds, it is slow, full stop.
If this test fails, the cause is almost always one of three: images served at full resolution, a pile-up of plugins on a WordPress site, overloaded shared hosting. The first two can be fixed without a rebuild.
One caveat: Google describes these indicators as a tie-breaker, less decisive than the relevance of the content. The argument is not about search rankings. A visitor kept waiting leaves without telling you.
It triggers a security warning
This is the only one of the six symptoms with a deadline, and it is close. Google announced in October 2025 that Chrome would ask for the user’s permission before opening a public HTTP site that they do not visit regularly. A first step is already in place for some users; the general rollout is announced for autumn 2026. Almost all browsing already happens over HTTPS: if your site is an exception, it will show.
The test. Look at the address bar:
https://orhttp://? Type thehttp://version and check that it switches over on its own. Click the icon to the left of the address — a padlock on Safari and Firefox, a settings icon on Chrome, which removed the padlock in 2023.
If this test fails, it is the best-value fix on the list. Call your hosting provider: ask for the free certificate and the automatic redirect from HTTP to HTTPS, included in almost every Swiss offer. Ask too whether renewal is automatic — certificate validity periods are getting shorter year by year, and “we do it by hand” will not hold.
Same call, under the bonnet: which version of PHP does the site run on, and what is preventing it from being updated? PHP 8.1 and earlier versions have received no security fixes since the end of 2025, and PHP 8.2 stops at the end of 2026. The blocker is often a theme or a plugin that is too old.
The form and the phone number no longer work
The site looks perfect, but nothing arrives. A change of email account, a broken plugin, an abandoned redirect, a number no longer in service. An expensive failure, and a hard one to spot.
The test. Send yourself a message from your form, using an address from a provider other than your own, then check the spam folder. Then call the number shown on the site, from a phone other than the office one.
This is the only one of the six tests to repeat regularly: a form breaks without warning. Put it in the diary every three months.
As soon as a site allows a contract to be concluded online — a sale, an order or a booking — Article 3 para. 1 let. s of the Federal Act on Unfair Competition (UCA; LCD in French, UWG in German) makes it unfair not to display complete contact details, email address included, not to describe the steps leading to the contract, and not to confirm the order without delay. A form does not replace a displayed email address. And while Switzerland imposes no legal notice page of the kind France requires with its mentions légales, the revised Federal Act on Data Protection (revised FADP) has required, since September 2023, that you inform the people whose data you collect — and a form collects data.
The content no longer matches reality
Opening hours from before the takeover, a colleague who left in 2022, a photo from a job ten years ago. Every discrepancy asks the visitor to check elsewhere. They check elsewhere.
The test. Search for “your company name + town”, then “your service + town”. Then compare your Google Maps listing and your site, line by line: hours, address, telephone, services. Finally, show the top of your home page to an outsider: do they know what you do, and where?
The site:yourdomain.ch command does not tell you whether you are indexed: Google points out that it is not meant for that. Search instead for the exact company name in quotation marks.
If Google displays “Own this business?”, nobody has claimed the listing — and anyone can then suggest a change of hours or address, or even report the business as closed. With no owner, nobody approves them. Claiming it is free: ten minutes, plus a wait for verification.
When a number changes, the old one does not linger on your site alone: think of local.ch, search.ch, your Facebook or LinkedIn page, the footer of your quotes and your invoices.
Nobody knows how to change it any more
This is what we come across most often among sole traders, and it is rarely a question of budget. The site was built by a family member, by an intern, by an agency that has since closed. The content is not out of date through negligence: it is out of date because nobody can touch it.
The test. Try it now, on a secondary page and on something you can undo: change one line of text. If you are still at it ten minutes later, you have your answer. Then answer four questions: who is the holder of the
.chdomain, who pays for the hosting, who has administrator access, who holds a backup?
These questions do not carry the same weight. Hosting can be changed and a site can be rebuilt; the domain is the only genuinely irreversible point. The SWITCH whois (nic.ch) no longer publishes the holder’s name, but it does say which registrar the domain is registered with; for hosting, the last invoice names it. And if the former provider cannot be reached, a domain is not lost: a transfer procedure exists.
Where to start
Pick up your sheet again and work through it in this order:
- What cuts you off from the client — a dead form, a wrong number, a security warning. Often repairable without a rebuild: one call to the hosting provider, sometimes half a day.
- What sorts your visitors before they have even read you: readability on a phone, loading time.
- What undermines your credibility: out-of-date content, a gap with your Google listing. Free, and you are the one who does it.
- Underneath everything, access and ownership. Until that question is settled, nothing else holds.
Repair or rebuild? If a single symptom fails, repair. If readability on a phone and access to the site fail together, repairing will cost more than rebuilding.
One question comes up every time: “if I rebuild the site, do I lose Google?” Put it to your provider in writing: will every current address be kept, or redirected one by one to its equivalent? Expect a period of adjustment and watch your results over the following weeks. Anyone who answers “guaranteed zero impact” is lying to you. But a site that nobody can change any more will never improve on its own.