01 / The test
One question tells you which one you need
Can the people who use your site do the thing they came to do?
If yes, and it just looks tired, you need a redesign. If no (the enquiry form has been broken since March, nobody can find your pricing, the whole thing takes nine seconds on a phone), you need a rebuild, and putting new paint on it will waste your money twice.
Most people ask the question the other way round. They look at the design, decide it feels dated, and start collecting inspiration. Then the new site launches, looks better, and converts exactly as badly as the old one did, because nothing underneath it changed.
02 / Redesign
When new paint is the right answer
A redesign keeps what you have and changes how it looks. It is the right call when the foundation is sound:
- The site is fast and works on a phone. Test it yourself on mobile data, not office wi-fi.
- You can edit it without calling anyone. If you can add a page today, the CMS is doing its job.
- The content is right, it is just presented badly. The words say the correct things in the wrong order.
- Nothing is broken. Forms arrive, links work, images load.
If all four are true, you are looking at a design pass, not a project. Keep the structure, keep the URLs, change the type, the spacing, the images and the hierarchy. It is cheaper, it is faster, and it protects the search rankings you have already earned.
03 / Rebuild
When starting again is the cheaper option
A rebuild replaces what is underneath. It sounds like the expensive choice, and it usually is not, because the alternative is paying somebody to work around problems that never go away. The signs:
Every change needs a developer. If updating an opening time means emailing someone, the site has already cost you more in delay than a rebuild would cost in money.
It is slow and nobody can explain why. Usually a page builder stacked on a theme stacked on twenty plugins. You can shave a second off. You cannot fix the architecture without replacing it.
It cannot do what the business now does. You added a service, a location, a booking system, a shop. The site was built for the business you had four years ago.
Nobody knows how it works. The person who built it is gone, there is no documentation, and every plugin update is a gamble.
It is not secure. Old PHP, abandoned plugins, no updates. This one is not a preference. Fix it.
04 / The cost nobody mentions
A rebuild puts your search rankings at risk, and that is manageable
This is the real argument for redesigning instead, and it is worth taking seriously. Change your URLs without a plan and you lose the traffic those pages earned. We have seen businesses drop most of their organic visits overnight because nobody mapped the old addresses to the new ones.
It is entirely preventable. Before anything goes live: list every URL on the current site, decide where each one lands on the new one, and put a permanent redirect in place. Keep the page titles and headings for pages that already rank. Do not quietly delete a page because it looks thin: if it brings people in, it earns its place.
Any builder who does not raise redirects before you ask about them is not thinking about your traffic.
05 / Honestly
Sometimes the answer is neither
If your site is fine and your enquiries are down, the problem may not be the site at all. It might be that nobody can find it, or that the phone number goes to voicemail, or that your prices moved and the market moved with them. Rebuilding a working site is an expensive way to avoid a harder conversation.
We say this to people who arrive asking for a rebuild more often than you would expect. It is usually cheaper to fix three pages and the follow-up process than to start again.
Send us the URL and we will tell you which of the three you are looking at: redesign, rebuild, or leave it alone and fix something else.