Five signs your website was built for 2015 Google, and two can drop you from it
A website does not break the way a car might break. Nothing snaps. It still loads when you type your name into it. It works. It just works for a Google that stopped existing years ago.
Nobody calls us because their website broke. They call because their phone stopped ringing. So here is the list of things we check first: five things Google changed since a lot of small-business sites were built, each with a check you can do in a minute. Two of them can cost you a place in Google's results altogether, not just a lower spot on the page.
Your address bar is telling customers not to trust you
Open your site and look at the left end of the address bar. If it says Not secure, that is all you need to know. Browsers now hide the front of an address, so click into the bar to see it in full: http:// rather than https:// is the same sign. The "s" is a setting that encrypts the connection between your site and its reader.
Google said in August 2014 that encryption counted toward ranking, and was blunt about how little: a very lightweight signal, under 1% of searches worldwide. The customer argument arrived in July 2018, when Chrome began labelling every unencrypted page Not secure. Not just checkout pages. All of them.
That label sits an inch from your phone number. Whether a stranger reads it and decides not to call is not something we can measure. Their browser serves it either way. Whether removing it is a five-minute setting or real work depends on who hosts your site. Ask them before it becomes a rebuild.
Since July 2024, a site a phone cannot open may not be in Google at all
Open your site on your actual phone. Tap the phone number. Fill in the contact form with your thumbs. If you have to pinch and drag sideways to read a sentence, write that down as a customer problem. It will not take you out of Google.
What does take you out is narrower: content a phone cannot reach at all, like a page that never loads on the phone. If your address starts with an "m", a separate stripped-down mobile version, Google tells you to keep the same content on both, and warns that a page which only bounces phone visitors to a mobile home page goes missing from search results.
Google reads pages with an automated visitor. It used to send a desktop one and a phone one. On July 5, 2024 it finished moving everything to the phone version. A site it cannot read on a phone may not be listed at all. No verdict about your business, no rule broken: the visitor could not see what is there, so there is nothing to list. Not a slide down the page. Just absent.
Google has counted how your site behaves for real visitors since 2021
Go to pagespeed.web.dev and put your address in. This is free, no login needed. The part worth reading is built from real people: what actual Chrome visitors went through over the previous 28 days.
It measures three things: how long until the main content shows up, how fast the page reacts to a tap, and whether the layout jumps while loading. Google calls them Core Web Vitals, and started counting them toward ranking in an update that rolled out from June 15, 2021 and finished that August.
One caution before you spend money on a score. A small local site often has too few visitors for that real-visitor section to appear, and what is left is Google simulating one page load. A red score with no real-visitor data behind it is a lab result, not evidence about your customers.
Your page titles are a list of towns
Look at the browser tab while your site is open. That text is your page title, one of the things Google draws on for the headline it shows in search results. If it reads Roofing Freehold NJ | Roofer Marlboro NJ | Best Roofing Colts Neck, it was written to be read by a search engine rather than by a person.
Then look for pages that are the same page with the town swapped. Same paragraphs and the same photo, one municipality changed. Google announced a ranking adjustment aimed at exactly this in March 2015, and said sites running large, well-established campaigns of these pages would feel it. That tells you how ordinary it was by then. Google's spam policies now name both patterns: keyword stuffing, which includes text listing the cities a page wants to rank for, and doorway pages, built to catch nearly identical searches.
Google says sites that break those policies may rank lower in its results, or not appear in them at all. That is the second of the two items here that can cost you your place. It is a different kind of loss from the phone problem above: that one is mechanical, this one is a judgment that you broke a rule.
The fix is writing, not money. One honest page per service you actually sell, with the towns named in a sentence a human would say out loud. Then something only you would know: what the permit takes in your township.
A popup that covers the page on arrival has been a ranking problem since 2017
Search your business name on your phone and tap through. Count the seconds until you can read a sentence without dismissing something. Google announced this one in August 2016 and applied it on January 10, 2017: pages where the content is hard to reach after a tap through from a mobile search result may not rank as highly.
A popup covering the content on arrival was the named example, and the scope is narrow: that first arrival from search, not a popup later in the visit. Turning it off is usually a setting in whatever tool added it. Switch it off, watch a month, put it back if the month is worse.
Most of this list is not worth a rebuild
Here is the part that argues against my own business model. An old website is not automatically a broken one. If your site is encrypted and a stranger on a phone can read it without being ambushed, a dated look is a taste problem and not a ranking one. What Google published about page experience is the speed, phone and encryption list above, and none of it is about how modern your design looks.
We cannot tell you what any of this is worth in dollars, and we are suspicious of anybody who can. What we can say is that four of these five are things a customer feels directly, whether or not they ever move a ranking. That count is ours and not Google's, and the page titles are the exception. A warning label beside your name is not itself a ranking problem. The missing encryption behind it barely is. It is a customer problem.
This ground keeps moving. The measurement Google uses for how fast a page reacts to a tap was swapped out on March 12, 2024, and Google's own free test for phones was retired the year before that. What sits underneath moves slower: a stranger on a phone should be able to learn what you do and reach you without a fight.
Every check above is free, whether or not you ever hire anybody. If you would rather see a current version of your site next to the one you have, we will build you a preview for free.