Problem 05
“Our website looks tired.”
A tired website tells visitors the business is tired too, and they leave before your work gets a look.

What it actually costs
What it is costing you
Why it happens
Why it happens
Websites age fast. The design that looked sharp at launch now looks like the year it was built, the words describe the business you were a few years ago, and the phone layout was an afterthought because phones were an afterthought then. Visitors notice, and a site that looks neglected makes people wonder what else is. Seaford’s beach huts get a fresh coat before every season. Websites tend to wait until the paint is peeling.
Underneath, the trouble is usually the build, not the look. A theme stacked with plugins, a page builder only one freelancer understands, a login nobody can find. Every change becomes a favour to ask, so nothing changes, and the site drifts away from what the business actually sells. Every month the gap grows, until the website is the least accurate description of the business anywhere. The owner of Live Happy couldn’t edit anything on her WordPress site, because it was locked behind an unresponsive developer, and she was paying for four rented tools around it.
And speed is part of looking good now. Slow pages lose people before anything appears, and the figures above show how little delay it takes. On a phone with a patchy signal, a heavy page is a blank page. A site that hides its best proof wastes the visitors who do stay: Game and Flames’ old site kept 69 five-star reviews out of sight. New colours on the same old build leave all of that exactly where it was.
How we fix it
How we fix it
- 01
We design every page around what visitors came to do.
Phone first, with your best proof where people will see it, because a good-looking site that hides the booking button is a brochure with a hosting bill.
- 02
We rewrite the words in plain English, and you sign off every line.
Real numbers, real reviews and real photographs of your work earn trust, and search engines can only rank what a page actually says, so we write it the way customers search.
- 03
We build it fast, on a codebase you own.
Live Happy’s homepage scores 0.98 to 0.99 for performance in Google’s Lighthouse test, passes accessibility checks across 16 pages and costs $0 a month to host in the client’s own Cloudflare account.
- 04
Your team gets an admin it can actually use.
Changing a price, a photo or a page shouldn’t need a developer, which is why Live Happy swapped a locked WordPress site and four rented tools for one platform with its own admin cockpit.
- 05
We move you across without losing what you’ve earned.
Every old address is redirected to its new home and your reviews come with you: Game and Flames launched with 37 redirects from its old site.
Proof
Shipped and running


Live Happy Coaching · Coaching and retreats, Flagstaff, Arizona
From locked WordPress to a platform she owns.
A 13-page site, a scored Happiness Quiz, a members’ community and an admin cockpit, all in the coach’s own Cloudflare account. Hosting: $0 a month.
0.98Lighthouse performance score, homepage
What it runs on
What it runs on
Questions people ask
Questions people ask
Do we need a rebrand as well?
Not always. If the logo and colours still work, we keep them and fix the site. If the brand itself looks dated, we refresh it alongside the site so the two launch together, rather than you paying for the work twice. A refresh usually means tightening what’s there rather than starting again: cleaner type, colours that work on a phone screen, photography that shows your actual work. We’ll tell you which you need on the review call, and if the honest answer is that your brand is fine and your website is the problem, that’s what you’ll hear.
Will we lose our Google rankings?
We do everything that protects them. If your site has pages that bring in work today, we find them first and treat them carefully. Where an address already works, we keep it, so there’s less to redirect in the first place. Every other old address gets a permanent redirect to its new home, and the pages that already rank keep their substance. Measurement goes in before launch, with Google Analytics and Search Console, so you can see what happens to your traffic rather than guess. Nothing is switched over until the redirects pass.
Can we edit it ourselves?
Yes. You get an admin built around the things you actually change: words, prices, photos and pages. Small changes should stay small, and a new price shouldn’t need a support ticket. Live Happy’s owner had been locked out of her own WordPress site; the new platform came with an admin cockpit, a media library and an enquiry inbox. We also show whoever will make the changes how to do it, so the first edit isn’t a guess. If you’d rather not touch it at all, we can run it for you, and you can still log in whenever you like.
Can it take bookings and payments?
Yes, and that’s often where a tired site is losing the most. Game and Flames’ site sells workshops and gift vouchers through Stripe checkout and prices weddings with an interactive calculator. Live Happy’s takes deposits for its retreats and runs a waitlist when they fill. If you already use a booking tool you like, we can connect to it instead of replacing it. Either way, the enquiry, the booking and the payment end up in one place you can see, and every flow is tested before launch: Live Happy’s 94 end-to-end user flows all pass.
What does it cost to run?
Very little. Live Happy’s hosting costs $0 a month in its own Cloudflare account, and Game and Flames runs on Cloudflare’s free tier. Your domain name and email are separate bills, as they are now, but there’s no rented site builder to pay for every month and no plugin licences to renew. Game and Flames and Live Happy both run nightly backups. The build itself is a fixed price, quoted after the free review with the value case beside it, so you know the whole cost before you commit to anything.

Free business review
Tell us what’s slow. We’ll tell you what to fix first.
A call of 20 to 30 minutes. We find the gaps, the leaks and the quick wins, and what each one is worth to you. Fixed price after that, no hourly rates. No 200-page deck.
Or tell us what you want to achieve and Dan will come back to you within one working day. Email dan@danielnicholls.com.