People come to me wanting a new website. Sometimes I talk them out of it, which is a strange thing to do for a living, so here’s the reasoning.
Everyone’s bias
Understand who’s advising you. A web designer paid to build websites will find a reason to build you a website. I’m one of those people. Keep that in mind while you read this.
The bias runs the other way too. You’ve been staring at your own site for three years and you’re sick of it. That’s a real feeling and a bad reason to spend money. Your customers have seen it once.
You’re bored of your website. Your customers have looked at it for forty seconds, once.
The honest test
Three questions, and you need honest answers rather than hopeful ones.
If the answer to all three is roughly yes and you just don’t like the look, you don’t need a rebuild. You need a tidy up and a shoot.
If the answer to all three is no, and the site fights you every time you try to change a price, that’s a rebuild.
The three fixes
Most sites that feel broken need the same three things, and none of them are a rebuild.
The first is photos. New photography changes how a site feels more than a new layout does, because the layout was rarely the problem. Stock images and phone snaps under bad light make a good business look uncertain.
The second is the path to the one action. Put the button where people can see it, on every page, and make it say what it does.
The third is speed and mobile. Compress the images, drop the plugins nobody uses, check it on an actual phone rather than a narrow browser window.
That last one matters more than people expect. A rebuild resets things that were quietly working. If your site ranks for anything at all, that’s an asset you can lose by starting over carelessly.
When to rebuild
There are times I’ll tell you to start again, and I’ll say so early rather than after taking a deposit.
Rebuild when you can’t edit it yourself and every small change costs you money and a week. Rebuild when it isn’t properly usable on a phone, because patching that is often more work than starting clean. Rebuild when the business has genuinely changed and the site describes a company you no longer run.
And rebuild when it’s built on something nobody supports any more, which is a security problem before it’s a marketing one.
Outside of that, fix the three things and spend the difference on getting people to it. That’s usually where the growth actually is.