Free tool
How out of date is your website?
Answer two questions. Every standard that changed since your site was built, dated and linked to its source, with the catch-up work priced.
I count every ranking signal, browser standard, and accessibility rule that has changed since your site was built, and price the work it takes to catch up.
Check your site
Not sure? Check the copyright date in your footer, or the date of your oldest blog post. Close is close enough.
Count the pages a customer would actually read. Contact, legal, and blog posts don’t move the number much.
How far behind
17
standards have changed since 2018.
See the full list, or choose a pillar to filter.
Estimates, not a quote. The hours are my own assessment of the work each change creates, priced at a blended $125 an hour: the rate an agency charges to put four specialisms on one job, not what one freelancer costs by the hour. What it actually costs depends on what is already in your code.
On the service, this catch-up work is included, so that number never builds up
The evidence
What changed after 2018
Showing all 17 · every item links to its source
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WCAG 2.1 published
Seventeen new success criteria were added, most of them covering mobile devices, low vision, and cognitive disability. It became the baseline that later legislation was written against.
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Chrome began marking every HTTP page “Not secure”
Sites without a certificate started showing a browser warning to every visitor, on every page, including contact and payment forms.
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Browsers began removing support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1
Older server configurations started failing to negotiate a connection in current browsers. A hosting-level problem that no amount of design work covers.
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AODA web accessibility deadline, Ontario
Public websites and web content were required to meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA. Compliance is reported to the province, and the requirement has been in force since.
Applies to: Ontario organisations with 50 or more employees
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Core Web Vitals became a Google ranking signal
Loading, interactivity, and visual stability moved from good practice to a measured input to mobile search rankings. Sites built before this were never tuned against thresholds that did not exist.
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Page experience signals extended to desktop
The same measurements Google had applied to mobile results were extended to desktop, closing the gap for sites that had only ever been tuned for one.
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Native lazy loading reached every major browser
Images below the fold could finally be deferred with a single attribute instead of a JavaScript library. Older sites still ship the library, and still pay for it on every page load.
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HTTP/3 published as RFC 9114
A faster transport layer, particularly on mobile connections. Whether your site uses it is decided by your host, not your designer, and older hosting plans often never enabled it.
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AVIF reached every major browser
A modern image format typically far smaller than JPEG at the same quality. Media libraries filled before this date are carrying weight they no longer need to carry.
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Universal Analytics stopped processing data
Any site still running the old tracking code went dark that day. Plenty did, and the owners found out months later when someone asked for a traffic number.
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Google cut back FAQ and How-to rich results
Structured data that had been earning expanded listings stopped displaying for most sites. FAQ results were narrowed to authoritative government and health sites, and How-to was limited to desktop before being dropped entirely.
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WCAG 2.2 published
Nine new success criteria, including minimum target sizes for touch, focus that cannot be obscured, alternatives to dragging, and authentication that does not depend on memory.
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INP replaced FID as a Core Web Vital
Responsiveness is now measured across the whole visit rather than the first tap. Sites carrying heavy JavaScript that passed the old metric commonly fail the new one.
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Google AI Overviews launched in the United States
An AI-written answer took the top of the results page, assembled from sources it can read. Being on page one stopped being the same thing as being seen.
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AI Overviews expanded past 100 countries
The change reached more than a billion monthly users, Canada included. Whether an AI tool can read your site at all became a question worth checking.
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Google AI Mode opened to all US users
A full conversational search tab, no opt-in required, that fans a single question out across many queries and returns one written answer with a handful of cited sources.
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European Accessibility Act enforcement began
Digital services sold to consumers in the EU must meet defined accessibility requirements. It applies by where your customers are, not by where your business is.
Applies to: Businesses selling to EU consumers, with small-enterprise exemptions
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AI Mode reached 180 countries and territories
Conversational search stopped being a US phenomenon. Whether these tools can reach and parse your site is now worth verifying rather than assuming.
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FAQ rich results removed from Google Search entirely
The narrowed eligibility from 2023 was withdrawn. FAQPage markup is still parsed, but the expanded listing it was added to earn no longer exists for anyone.
Dataset last reviewed August 2026. Every entry links to its source so you can check it yourself.
Why it happens
Nobody tells you when your site falls behind.
None of this sent you a notification.
Every change on that list happened somewhere else: a browser release, a W3C publication, a Google announcement, a new law. Your site kept loading exactly as it always had.
It isn’t a list of things done wrong.
A site built correctly in 2018 was built correctly in 2018. The trouble is that correct has a date attached to it, and nothing you do in your business renews that date.
The longer the list, the larger the quote.
This is the whole business model of a five-year rebuild cycle. The catch-up work gets billed as a project because nobody kept the site current, and the invoice depends on how far it drifted.
Two answers only get you a rough estimate.
The estimate above is arithmetic. It can’t tell you which pages are failing, which fixes overlap, or what shortcuts are buried in the code from the last time somebody was in a hurry.
If this was useful
Where to go next.
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Find out what’s failing silently.
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ThreeSeven Digital · https://three7.digital/website-expiry-check/