On this page
- 1. You avoid editing it
- 2. The business changed and the site did not
- 3. It is slow, and the slowness is baked in
- 4. It was never really designed for phones
- 5. Enquiries dried up and nothing else explains it
- 6. Nobody can find anything
- 7. It is running on something unmaintained
- Refresh or rebuild?
- What to keep when you rebuild
- The order to do it in
Not every tired website needs replacing. Plenty just need better photography, a tidier homepage, and someone to delete the half of the copy nobody reads. That is a refresh, it costs a fraction of a rebuild, and it is often the right call.
But some problems are structural, and paint does not fix structure. These are the seven signs we look for, roughly in order of how reliably they point at a rebuild.
1. You avoid editing it
This is the most reliable sign of all, and the one people are least likely to mention when they get in touch.
If changing a price means emailing a developer, or adding a team member means wrestling a page builder until the layout breaks on mobile, then the site has stopped being an asset and become an obstacle. You will put changes off. The site will drift further from the truth every month. Eventually it describes a business you no longer run.
The test is simple: ask whoever is meant to update it when they last did, and watch their face.
2. The business changed and the site did not
You have moved upmarket. You dropped a service. You added a second location, or started selling to a different kind of customer entirely. The site still argues the old case, in the old order, to the old audience.
No amount of restyling turns a page about the wrong thing into a page about the right thing. If the structure — what exists, in what order, with what emphasis — no longer matches how you sell, that is a rebuild even if every colour stays the same.
3. It is slow, and the slowness is baked in
Some slowness is fixable in an afternoon: oversized images, a caching plugin nobody configured, a host that was never right. Fix those first — they are cheap and they often sort it.
Some of it is structural: a theme that loads megabytes of code on every page because it ships every feature anyone might want, or a stack of plugins each doing a tenth of a job. If you have compressed the images, moved to decent hosting, and it is still sluggish, the problem is the foundation and no amount of tuning will reach it.
Worth diagnosing properly before deciding: why your website is slow walks through the causes in the order they usually turn out to be the culprit.
4. It was never really designed for phones
Almost every site is technically responsive — the layout squashes down and nothing falls off the screen. That is not the same as being designed for a phone, and the gap between the two is where a lot of lost enquiries live.
Do this now, on your own phone, on mobile data rather than office wi-fi: try to do the main thing a customer comes to your site to do. Find a price. Book something. Get your phone number into their dialler.
Count the taps. Notice whether the important button is below three screens of preamble, whether the text is big enough in daylight, whether the menu is usable one-handed. Most of your visitors are having that experience, not the one you see on a large monitor.
5. Enquiries dried up and nothing else explains it
Before blaming the design, rule out the boring causes — we have seen all of these masquerade as “the website stopped working”:
- The contact form silently failing, so submissions go nowhere and nobody is told
- Notification emails landing in a spam folder since a mail setting changed
- A Google Business listing that fell out of date, or lost its opening hours
- A phone number changed on the site but not in the places that link to it
Once those are clear, look at whether traffic is steady. If people are still arriving and enquiries have fallen, the site is failing to make its case — which is a content and structure problem, not a styling one.
6. Nobody can find anything
Navigation tends to grow by accretion: a new link each time somebody asks for one. After a few years it describes your internal org chart rather than your customer’s question.
Two symptoms worth taking seriously. If the main menu has more than about seven items, people stop reading it and start guessing. And if two items mean roughly the same thing to an outsider — “Solutions” and “What we do”, say — then every visitor has to make a decision you could have made for them.
Reorganising information architecture is a redesign even when the visual style survives intact. It is also the change that most often produces an immediate, visible improvement.
7. It is running on something unmaintained
An abandoned theme. A plugin last updated four years ago. A PHP version your host is about to stop supporting.
This is the one sign that comes with a deadline attached, and it is not negotiable. Unmaintained code is how sites get compromised, and the attacks are not personal — automated scanners work through known vulnerabilities across millions of sites without caring who you are. Being small is not protection.
Refresh or rebuild?
| Symptom | Usually a refresh | Usually a rebuild |
|---|---|---|
| Looks dated | ✓ | |
| Copy is waffly or out of date | ✓ | |
| Photography is weak | ✓ | |
| Homepage says too much at once | ✓ | |
| Slow despite optimised images and decent hosting | ✓ | |
| You cannot edit it yourself | ✓ | |
| Navigation no longer makes sense | ✓ | |
| Business model has moved on | ✓ | |
| Platform, theme or plugins unmaintained | ✓ |
What to keep when you rebuild
A rebuild does not mean throwing everything away, and treating it that way is how businesses lose ground they spent years gaining.
Your URLs. These carry whatever search ranking you have earned. Changing them without redirects from old address to new is the single fastest way to undo years of work, and the damage shows up weeks later when it is hard to connect to the cause. Every rebuild should start with a list of existing addresses and end with a redirect for each one that moved.
Your best-performing pages. Before redesigning anything, find out which pages actually bring people in and which ones they read to the end. Those pages are working. Study them before replacing them — sometimes the honest answer is that the new site should be more like the old one in that particular respect.
Anything that already converts. If a particular page, offer or form reliably produces enquiries, that is evidence, and evidence beats taste.
Photography and brand assets, where they are good. There is rarely a reason to reshoot everything.
The order to do it in
A redesign that starts with visuals almost always has to be redone. The order that works is content and structure first, then design, then build.
Decide what the site needs to say and in what order. Agree the structure. Write the words, or at least enough of them to design against. Then design pages for that content rather than content for those pages. It feels slower for the first fortnight and it is considerably faster by the end.
A good redesign begins by working out what is already pulling its weight and rebuilding around it. If you are weighing it up, send us the address — we will tell you honestly which of the two you need, including when the answer is the cheaper one.
