Every trade business has said it at some point: "the website's fine for now, we'll sort it properly later." Later has a habit of arriving three years and one lost ranking position after it should have.
Google is not a patient audience
Search engines reward sites that are fast, mobile-friendly, and regularly updated, and quietly bury the ones that aren't. Google's own SEO starter guide is refreshingly blunt about this: page experience and content quality aren't nice-to-haves, they're baseline requirements for showing up at all. A site that hasn't been touched since a previous decade's design trends generally reads to Google - and to customers - as a business that might not be trading any more.
The "later" tax
The longer a website sits untouched, the more expensive it gets to fix, because competitors haven't been sitting still. Every review they've collected, every page they've added, every second their site loads faster than yours is a small compounding advantage. None of it is dramatic on its own. All of it adds up to a search results page where you're on page two.
What actually moves the needle
You don't need a website that does everything. You need one that loads quickly, works properly on a phone (most trade searches happen on one), and clearly says what you do and where you do it. Everything else is decoration. If you want a sense of what "properly built, not templated" looks like in practice, our web design work is a reasonable place to poke around, though a good local web developer of any stripe will tell you the same basics.
The verdict
"Later" isn't a strategy, it's a slow leak. The good news is that fixing it is rarely as big a job as putting it off makes it feel.