Do you need a new website, or does yours just need fixing?

Separate "dated" from "broken"

These feel the same to a business owner and are completely different problems. A dated site looks like it was designed some years ago. A broken site does not work.

Dated is a cosmetic issue and often costs you less than you think — plenty of visitors care far more about finding your phone number than about your typography. Broken costs you money every day.

Work out which you have before spending anything. If your site loads in under two seconds, works on a phone, and the contact form arrives in your inbox, you have a dated site and a refresh will do. If any of those fail, you have a broken site, and a redesign that does not address the cause will produce a prettier broken site.

The case for fixing

Fixing is faster, cheaper, and does not put your search rankings at risk. You keep the URLs, the accumulated history, and the content that already works.

It is also more precise. A rebuild changes everything at once, so if traffic drops afterwards you have no idea which change caused it. Fixing one thing at a time tells you what actually mattered.

Most of what makes a site feel bad is covered in the mistakes I find on almost every site — and nearly all of them are individually fixable in an hour or two.

When a rebuild is genuinely right

There are real cases. Roughly, it is worth rebuilding when:

• The platform is abandonedThe theme or system is no longer maintained and no longer receives security updates. That is a liability, not an inconvenience — see maintenance and security.
• It cannot be made responsiveSome older sites are built in ways that cannot sensibly adapt to phones. Retrofitting costs more than starting again.
• The structure fights youIf adding a page means fighting the system, and you have avoided updating it for that reason, the site is actively costing you.
• The business has changedYou now do different work for different people. Content and structure both need rethinking, not patching.
• Fixing costs more than replacingOccasionally the list of faults is long enough that a clean build is genuinely cheaper. An honest audit tells you this.

The risk nobody mentions

A rebuild done carelessly destroys search rankings. Every URL changes, and unless each old address redirects to its new equivalent, years of accumulated authority is thrown away overnight.

Google is explicit about this: its site move documentation (opens in a new tab) treats a redirect map as a required step, not an optional nicety.

If you are getting quotes for a redesign, ask directly how they will handle redirects. An answer that is vague or dismissive tells you a great deal — see choosing a web designer.

Sources and further reading

• Site moves with URL changes (opens in a new tab)Google Search CentralThe official process for changing URLs without losing rankings.
• Redirects and Google Search (opens in a new tab)Google Search Central

Common questions

How much does a website rebuild cost?

It varies enormously with scope. The more useful comparison is against the alternative: get a quote for fixing the specific faults as well, and compare. Often the fix list is a fraction of the rebuild price and solves the actual complaint.

Will a new website improve my Google ranking?

Not automatically, and done badly it will make things worse. A rebuild helps if it fixes speed, mobile usability and structure. It hurts if URLs change without redirects. The design itself is not a ranking factor.

How long does a rebuild take?

For a small business site, typically two to three weeks of build time once content is settled. Content is almost always the bottleneck — the writing and photographs take longer than the building.