The signals that date a website, and which ones cost money

Pages not indexed, checked in the page indexing report: a page Google never had earns nothing. Failing Core Web Vitals, checked in the CWV report: a confirmed ranking input, measured on real visits. No mobile parity, checked by opening it on a phone: the buyer in a hurry is on a phone. Outdated dependencies, checked on your platform's update screen: OWASP lists this as its own category. And content that answers less than the competitor's, checked by reading both, against the helpful-content guidance.

Run them in that order. The first two are free, take ten minutes, and can change the diagnosis — a site that looks old and ranks fine has a credibility problem; a site that looks current and is half-unindexed has a structural one, and the second is the expensive one.

Stock photography of someone else's building. A copyright year three years stale. A carousel. Text over a photo at a contrast nobody can read. Those are real — a buyer comparing three contractors does read them as neglect — but they are a day of work, not a rebuild, and no agency should price them as one.

The honest division: if your top five problems are on this list, you need copy and a visual pass. If they are on the list above, you need the thing underneath.