Most owners come to a redesign with a gut feeling: the site looks old, or something about it is off. The harder question is whether it needs a few weeks of fixes or a fresh start.
Get it wrong one way and you spend money polishing something that will never work. Get it wrong the other way and you throw out pages that were quietly bringing in calls. Here's how to tell which one you're dealing with, and what each really involves.
Check what's working first
Before you judge the site by how it looks, look at what it does. Three free tools will tell you most of it in an afternoon.
- Google Search Console. Go to the Performance report and sort your pages by clicks. The pages at the top are the ones Google already sends people to. Whatever you decide, those pages and their addresses need to survive.
- Google Analytics 4. Look at which pages lead to a call, a form or a booking. If you haven't set those up as key events yet, do that first and give it a few weeks.
- PageSpeed Insights. Test your homepage and your busiest service page on mobile. It will tell you if the site is slow, and roughly why.
Then do the simplest test of all. Try to call, book or send a form from your phone, the way a customer would, and note every place you hesitate.
Signs a fix will do
A fix makes sense when the bones are fine and a few things around them aren't. You're probably in fix territory if:
- People find you and call. Search Console shows steady clicks, and enquiries haven't dropped. The site is doing its job, just not as well as it could.
- You can edit it yourself. You can change a price, add a photo or write a new page without calling anyone.
- It works on a phone. It might not be pretty, but nothing is broken, cut off or too small to tap.
- The problems have names. Slow images, a cluttered homepage, a form that asks for too much, a missing page for your best service. Each one is a job you can list and finish.
In that case, work through the list in order of what costs you the most. Speed and the path to contact usually come first. A fresh look can come later, or not at all. Here's what usually slows a site down.
Signs it's time to start over
Some sites can't be patched into shape. It's usually time for a new one when:
- Every change needs a developer. A new page or a changed heading means a ticket, a quote and a wait.
- It's stuck on a platform you've outgrown. A builder that can't take bookings, an old theme nobody updates, or a pile of plugins where updating one breaks two others.
- It doesn't work on a phone. Not slightly awkward, but actually broken: menus that don't respond, text you have to pinch to read, buttons hidden off the screen.
- The business has changed. You've added services, moved, rebranded or changed who you sell to, and the site still describes the business you were five years ago.
- Security worries you. Out-of-date software, warnings in the browser, or nobody who knows how to update it. That's a risk to you and to your customers.
One of these on its own might still be fixable. Two or three together usually mean you'd spend more patching the site than rebuilding it.
What each one really costs
The quote is only part of it. Both paths cost something else too.
A fix costs time, spread out. Each change is small, but they add up, and you live with the parts you didn't touch. If the platform underneath is the problem, you'll keep paying for fixes on something that keeps breaking.
A rebuild costs attention up front. You'll need to decide what the site is for, gather photos, check the copy and test everything before launch. It also carries one real risk: losing the search traffic you already have.
That risk is avoidable. Before you start, crawl the old site with the free version of Screaming Frog, which lists every page, title and broken link. When page addresses change, set up 301 redirects from each old address to its new one, so Google and anyone with a bookmark lands in the right place. Then watch Search Console for errors in the weeks after launch. Skipping this step is the most common way a new site loses rankings the old one had.
The goal isn't a new site. It's a site that brings in more work than the old one did.
How to decide
If you're still unsure, write two lists. On the first, every problem you have with the site today. On the second, everything that's working: the pages people find, the reviews you show, the form that brings in leads.
Then go through the first list and mark each problem as surface or structure. Surface problems are colours, photos, wording and layout. Structure problems are the platform, how the pages are built and whether you can edit them.
- Mostly surface? Fix it. Start with whatever stands between a visitor and contacting you.
- Mostly structure? Start over, and plan the move so everything on your second list comes with you.
- A mix? Think about the next three years. If you plan to add services, locations or online booking, build for that now instead of patching twice.
Either way, keep the old site live until the new one is finished, tested on a phone and set up with redirects. And launch in a quiet week, not right before your busiest one.
If you'd like a second opinion, our website redesigns start by finding what's already working, so it survives the move. If you're starting from a blank page, here's what a small business site actually needs.
