Sometimes the site is the problem.

The signs a rebuild is the honest answer

None of these on its own is decisive. Three or more together usually is.

• It is unusable on a phone. Not merely ugly — text that needs pinching, buttons too small to hit, a menu that will not open. Most local traffic in Brussels is mobile, so this is most of your traffic.
• Nobody can edit it. The person who built it is unreachable, the CMS login is lost, or changing a phone number requires a developer. A site you cannot update is a liability that grows.
• It takes more than four or five seconds to become useful on a normal mobile connection, usually because of uncompressed images or a theme loading a dozen plugins.
• The content is genuinely out of date. Old prices, a discontinued service, a team member who left in 2022. This costs trust faster than any technical fault.
• It only exists in one language while your customers search in another.
• The platform is abandoned or insecure — an unmaintained WordPress with plugins years behind, or a builder whose company has shut down.

If none of that applies and the audit finds missing meta descriptions, no schema and a couple of broken headings, you do not need a new website. You need an afternoon. We will tell you that, and it is fine that it costs us the project.

What a small-business site in Brussels actually needs

Far less than most proposals suggest. In rough order of what earns its place:

1. What you do and where, visible without scrolling, in the language your customers search in.
2. A phone number that dials on tap and an address that is selectable text rather than an image.
3. Opening hours, in the page and in the markup, matching the Business Profile exactly.
4. One clear thing to do next — call, book, request a quote. One, not five.
5. Proof. Real photos of real work, and reviews shown honestly.
6. Pages per service, if you sell distinct things. One page cannot rank for six different intents.
7. Speed. Compressed images, few scripts, no carousel nobody uses.

What does not earn its place on a five-page local site: a blog nobody will maintain, a chat widget nobody staffs, a stock-photo hero that could belong to any business in Europe, and an animation that delays the phone number.

Keeping what the old site earned

The most expensive mistake in a rebuild is launching new URLs and letting the old ones 404. Every ranking and every external link pointing at an old page is an asset, and it transfers only if each retired URL is 301 redirected to its nearest equivalent.

Do it as part of the launch, not afterwards. A month of 404s is a month of Google deciding those pages are gone. This is the same reason our own retired pages redirect rather than disappear.

Platform

For a local business with a handful of pages, a fast static site is usually the right answer: nothing to patch, nothing to break, and it survives being left alone for a year. WordPress earns its complexity when you genuinely publish regularly or need a shop. Squarespace and Wix are defensible when you want to edit everything yourself and accept the ceiling on speed and control.

The wrong reason to choose any of them is that it is what the last agency happened to use.

Cost and time, honestly

A focused local site — five or six pages, two languages, built fast, with redirects handled — is a matter of weeks rather than months, and it is a project fee rather than a retainer. We quote after the audit, because the audit is what tells us whether you need one at all. If you want to skip ahead, the request form takes two minutes and asks for the business, the site and what you want out of it.

Motion and brand work — intros, showreels, animated identity — run through Three, the studio next door, when a project needs them.