A website does not announce the day it stops being an asset. It just gradually starts losing arguments you never hear: the customer on a phone who gave up pinching and zooming, the form submission that went nowhere, the search ranking that slid while nobody was watching. By the time it is obvious, it has been true for a while.
Five symptoms are worth treating as alarms. Your team is afraid to change anything because the last person who understood the site is gone. The platform or its plugins no longer receive updates. The site is genuinely bad on a phone, where most of your visitors now are. Simple content changes require a developer and an invoice. And nobody can say with confidence whether the contact form actually delivers, because nobody has tested it in a year.
Any one of these is friction. Two or more usually means the site has crossed from needing maintenance to needing a decision, because money spent patching an unsupported foundation is money spent twice.
The decision does not have to be dramatic. Sometimes it is a rebuild, sometimes a migration to a maintainable platform, sometimes a modest cleanup with a real maintenance arrangement so the slide does not resume. What matters is making it deliberately, with an honest assessment in hand, instead of letting the oldest part of your marketing make the choice by failing on its own schedule.
