How to Tell If Your Website Is Broken

TL;DR

Most of the websites we're asked to replace didn't need replacing. Four signs hold up: the site says something about your business that's no longer true, your team can't publish without a developer, it fails on a phone, or it runs on a platform nobody will maintain. Website pricing has a wide range depending on what is being requested. A custom site is about $32,600 and ten to sixteen weeks; a five-page information site is $4,500 and about ten weeks. Looking dated to you is not one of the signs.

Most of the websites we are asked to replace did not need replacing. They needed one page rewritten, a form that works on a phone, and a hosting plan that was not from 2016. The owner had been told “your site is outdated” by someone selling websites, and it stuck. So before the question of what a new site costs, the honest question is whether you need one at all. Here is how we decide.

What are the signs a website actually needs to be replaced?

Four that hold up. The site says something about your business that is no longer true: services you dropped, a positioning you outgrew, a name you changed. Your team cannot publish a page without a developer, so the site has frozen at whatever it said the day it launched. It fails on a phone, which for most Oklahoma City businesses is where more than half of visits arrive. Or it is built on a platform nobody will maintain, so every update is a risk instead of a routine.

Signs that do not hold up: it looks dated to you, a competitor just launched a new one, and a vendor told you so. Taste ages faster than usefulness. If the site still says the right things to the right people and they can act on it, leave it alone and spend the money on being found.

How much does a new business website cost in Oklahoma City?

Two real numbers from our own fee schedule. A custom site with its own design system, desktop and mobile prototypes, and a CMS built for your team is about $32,600, plus $200 a month for hosting if we hold it. Smaller builds start at $10,000; the range is wide because the scope is. Design is the biggest phase at $13,600, development is $13,000, and $6,000 of the development is the CMS blocks that let a marketing coordinator publish without calling anyone.

A five-page site for a business that needs to be found more than it needs to be admired is $4,500. We only sell that as part of a $13,500 findability package with search and answer-engine work, a Google Business Profile push, and a year of articles, because a small site that nobody can find is a $4,500 brochure. The difference between the two prices is a design system, and whether the site has to carry a brand or just a phone number.

Anything quoted well under $4,000 for a full site is a template with your logo dropped in, and it will be replaced again in eighteen months. Price it as a rental.

How long does a website project take?

Ten to sixteen weeks for the custom build, and the schedule slips on content, never on code. The site is designed around what it needs to say, so the weeks where a client is writing or approving copy are the weeks that stretch. The small information site runs about ten weeks start to finish because the copy is drawn from what you already have. An agency promising a full site in two weeks is skipping the part where they find out what the site is for.

Should the site be built for search from the start?

Yes, and in 2026 that means two things. Google still needs clean structure, speed, and a page for each thing you want to rank for. AI answer engines need something different: a page that answers the question a buyer would type, in plain sentences, with your city in it. We measure both. Across the queries we track, the pages that get cited by Perplexity and Gemini are service pages that name a place and answer a question, and the pages that never get cited are the ones that describe a company in general terms. Build the second kind and you will pay for it later in a rewrite.

What platform should an Oklahoma City business use?

WordPress for anything content-driven, because you own it and every developer in the state can work on it. Shopify for stores. Webflow when the site is mostly design and a small team will maintain it. We build on all three and choose by who is going to run the site after we leave.

Avoid anything proprietary. When the platform is the reason you cannot leave the agency, the platform is the product. Ask who owns the site, the content, and the domain if you walk away in a year. If the answer takes more than one sentence, walk away now.

Related reading: our web design and development work, 3 questions to ask before hiring a web agency, what a marketing agency costs in Oklahoma City, and our branding work in Oklahoma City.