When to redesign your website

Studios have an obvious interest in telling you that your site is out of date. So let us start with the opposite: a site that is fast, honest, clear about what you do, and producing enquiries does not need redesigning because a trend has moved on. Age is not a reason. Cost is. Here are the signs that a site has started to cost you, and the ones that only look like problems.

Signs that it is costing you

1. Your best customers are choosing competitors whose work is no better than yours. The site is failing to make the case, and price is filling the gap.
2. It is slow on a phone. Check it on your own phone, on mobile data, away from the office. If you wait, so do your customers, and most of them do not.
3. You are embarrassed to send people to it. If you find yourself saying "ignore the website, here's my Instagram", the site is already costing you.
4. The business has changed and the site has not: new services, new locations, a new position in the market, a price point the site's look no longer supports.
5. Nobody can update it. Every change goes through someone who is unavailable, or breaks something, so the site quietly stops being true.
6. Enquiries arrive with the wrong expectations, about price, about scope, about what you do, because the site set them.
7. It is not being found. Search traffic has fallen, or never existed, and the site's structure makes it hard for search engines and answer engines to understand.
8. It cannot do the next thing: booking, a shop, a portal, a second language, and adding it would mean fighting the foundation.

Things that look like problems and are not

• It does not follow the current visual trend. Trends are how sites end up looking the same; a site with a considered, consistent look ages better than one that chased last year's.
• A competitor just launched a flashy site. Watch what it does for them over a year before reacting.
• It is three years old. Some of the best sites we know are older. Age is only a problem when it has caused one of the signs above.

Refresh or rebuild?

Not every problem needs a new site. If the structure and the foundation are sound and the problems are copy, photography, or a few pages, a refresh is the right spend: rewrite the pages that matter, replace the images, fix the calls to action, tune performance. If the problems are structural, the wrong pages, the wrong journey, a slow or fragile platform, a design that cannot carry the business as it is now, then a refresh is money spent decorating the wrong thing, and a rebuild is cheaper in the end.

The test we use: can the site be made right by changing what is on it, or only by changing what it is? The first is a refresh. The second is a redesign, and it should start from strategy rather than from a mood board, as we argue in strategy before aesthetics.

What to keep

A redesign is not a clean slate and should not be treated as one. Keep the pages that rank and the addresses they live at, or redirect them properly. Keep the content that customers have told you is useful. Keep what the analytics say is working. A redesign that throws away a site's search history to look new is one of the most expensive mistakes a business can make with a website, and it is a common one.