5 Warning Signs in the Numbers That Your Old Website Isn't Paying Off (Free to Check with Google's Tools)

Picture an air-conditioner repair shop. Three years ago the owner paid someone to build a website, and has renewed the domain and hosting every year since. But when someone asks, "Has the website brought you any customers?", there's no answer. Nobody has ever looked at the numbers. All the owner knows is that the site still loads.

I think this happens to a lot of SMEs. The website gets finished and then left alone, and no one knows whether it's working or just quietly eating the budget. The good news is that most of the answers are free, in two Google tools: Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 (GA4). This article walks through 5 warning signs you can read from the numbers in those two tools, plus a way to decide when one fix is enough and when it's time to think about a new website.

Before you start: open these two tools

Google Search Console tells you how often your site appears on Google and how many people click through. GA4 tells you what people do once they arrive. If you haven't registered with Search Console yet, I covered the basic setup in the essential SEO checklist for small business websites.

One tip applies to every sign below: don't judge from a single month. Compare with the same period last year, or at least compare the last three months with the three months before, because many businesses have busy and quiet seasons anyway.

Sign 1: Almost nobody sees your site on Google

In Search Console, open the Performance report and look at Impressions, the number of times your site showed up in search results. If this number is very low or keeps falling, customers searching for what you sell have almost no chance of finding you.

Check the Queries tab too, to see which searches bring people to your site. If the only queries are your own shop name, the people finding your site already know you. The website isn't helping you reach new customers yet.

Common causes: pages with very little content, no pages that answer customers' questions, or page Titles that don't say what you sell.

Sign 2: People see you, but don't click

On the same page you'll find CTR (Click-Through Rate), which is clicks divided by impressions, and Average position, your average ranking in the results. Read these two together.

To show how much ranking matters, an analysis of about 4 million search results by Backlinko found the number one result had an average CTR of 27.6%, and the top three results together took 54.4% of all clicks. I want to be clear about the limits here. This data was collected around 2022, the study doesn't say which country it covers, and it was gathered before Google started showing AI answers above the results. I couldn't find a checkable source with figures for Thailand specifically. So use these numbers to see the direction, not as a target to hit.

In practice: if a page already ranks near the top but its CTR is clearly lower than your other pages, the problem is usually the text shown in the search results.

Common causes: Titles and Meta Descriptions that don't invite a click, are the same on every page, or don't match what people searched for.

Sign 3: The site is slow or hard to use on a phone

This matters especially for Thai websites. StatCounter data for September 2026 shows about 78% of web traffic in Thailand came from mobile phones and about 18% from desktop computers. The figure changes every month, but the direction is clear: most of your customers see your site on a phone screen.

Search Console has a Core Web Vitals report showing which pages pass or fail. The "good" thresholds Google publishes on web.dev (last updated May 2025) are: the main content loads within 2.5 seconds (LCP), the page responds to a tap within 200 milliseconds (INP), and the layout doesn't jump around while loading (CLS no higher than 0.1), measured at 75% of real visits.

Many articles quote a figure about people leaving a site that takes more than three seconds to load. It comes from Google research from 2016, but the original page has since moved and I couldn't open it to check, so I'm not using that number here.

Common causes: large uncompressed images, plugins or scripts that have piled up over the years, or a theme designed for desktop screens first.

Sign 4: People arrive and leave straight away

For this one, open GA4 and look at Engagement rate. According to Google's definition, a visit counts as "engaged" if it meets any one of these: it lasts longer than 10 seconds, it includes 2 or more page views, or it triggers something you've set as a goal (a key event). Visits that meet none of these count as a bounce.

There's no universal number that counts as good, because it varies a lot by type of business. What actually works is comparing pages within your own site. If one page has a much lower engagement rate than the others, open it on a phone and look at it as a customer would. Can you see what you came for on the first screen?

Common causes: a homepage that doesn't say what the shop sells, prices or details buried deep, or information so old customers aren't sure the shop is still open.

Sign 5: People visit, but nobody gets in touch

This is the number closest to sales. Set up key events in GA4 for taps on your call button, your LINE button, or form submissions, then check how many happen each month. If hundreds or thousands of people visit each month but contacts are zero or close to it, the site is bringing people in but not getting them as far as talking to you.

If your site doesn't have contact buttons that are easy to see, or you want to know which channel customers come from, I explained how to place buttons and separate your links in techniques to drive website visitors to close sales on LINE OA, TikTok and Instagram.

Common causes: contact buttons at the bottom of the page where nobody scrolls, a phone number shown as an image so it can't be tapped to call, or a form that's too long.

Fix one thing, or build a new website?

I'm not suggesting you throw away your old site every time a number looks bad. If you find only one or two problems, and you or your team can change the text, images or buttons yourselves, fixing that spot is usually better value than starting over.

But if you find several at once, ask yourself these three questions:

• Does the site fail Core Web Vitals on mobile, and keep failing after fixes, because the problem is in how the site is built?

• Does every text change or image swap mean waiting for, or paying, the person who built the site, so it never gets updated?

• Can you not install GA4 or track contact buttons, because the old system doesn't support it or nobody can access the back end anymore?

If you answer yes to two or more, keeping the old site alive may cost more than starting again on a tool you can edit yourself. If you're weighing whether to hire someone or do it yourself, I compared the pros and cons in hiring a web developer vs. building with AI.

I understand that walking away from a site you've already paid for is not an easy decision. But the money already spent can't be recovered. What you can still choose is the money and time you spend from here on.

If you do decide to rebuild, plan the page structure for newer kinds of search at the same time, following how to structure your website for AI search.

Summary

The five signs to check are:

• how often your site appears on Google

• the share of people who click

• speed on mobile

• the share of people who stay

• the number of times customers get in touch

All of them are free in Search Console and GA4, they don't take long to check, and they tell you what the money you pay for your website each year is actually bringing back.

If you look and find your old site really isn't working, HugWeb lets you build a new one by chatting in Thai, and change the text or images yourself whenever you like, without waiting for anyone.

There's no need to decide right away. Start by opening Search Console once, then come back and tell me what you found.