When to rebuild a website instead of patching it

Compared 6 min read

How to tell whether your website needs a handful of small fixes or a fresh start, and the four conditions that make patching the more expensive choice.

Somebody has told you the site needs redoing. Maybe it was a cold caller, maybe it was your nephew, maybe it was your own eye on a Sunday evening. The site is a few years old, it looks dated to you, and the word rebuild is now sitting in your head with a number attached to it.

Most of the time that decision gets made on a feeling. It is better made on a short list of specifics.

The question is not how old the site is

Age tells you very little. A plain site built five years ago that loads quickly, works on a phone and can be edited when your number changes is a working site. A site built last year that nobody can get into is a problem regardless of the date on it.

What matters is whether it can do its job and whether it can be changed.

Write down what actually goes wrong

Before anybody quotes you anything, spend ten minutes making a list of what the site actually fails at, as opposed to what you dislike about it.

Open it on your own phone, not your desktop. Try to find your phone number in under five seconds. Fill in your own inquiry form and see whether the email arrives. Look for your hours, your service area and your prices, and see whether any of them are still true.

That list is the whole decision. If it has three items on it and they are all text, you have a list of edits, not a rebuild. If it has eight items and half of them are structural, you have something else.

Nobody can edit it, including the person who built it

This is the most common reason a site needs replacing.

The site was built by somebody who has moved on. The login goes to an email address nobody checks. It sits on a platform that has been discontinued, or a version of one that cannot be updated without breaking the pages. So every small change becomes an archaeology job, and archaeology is billed by the hour.

At that point you are paying rebuild money in instalments and getting no new site at the end of it. That is the case where starting again is cheaper.

It was never built for a phone

Most people who look you up are doing it on a phone, often outdoors, often in a hurry.

Open your site on yours. If you have to pinch and drag to read a sentence, if the menu will not open, if the phone number is an image instead of something you can tap, that is a customer giving up, not a styling preference.

Sometimes this can be fixed inside the existing site and sometimes it cannot, and the answer depends entirely on how it was put together. Anybody quoting you should be able to say which, and say why.

The thing it is built on is no longer supported

Websites sit on top of software, and software goes out of support. When it does, the security updates stop.

You will not see this happen. What you see eventually is a browser warning in front of your pages, or a host that switches the site off. None of that is your fault. It is the ordinary end of a piece of software's life.

If the foundation is out of support, patching is a holding action with a date on it. A rebuild here replaces a part that has worn out rather than upgrading anything.

You want to move it and you cannot

Sometimes the site is fine and the arrangement around it is not. You want to leave a provider, or you want somebody else to look after it, and it turns out the site cannot travel: it lives inside a platform that keeps the pages to itself, or the files exist but nobody will hand them over.

Settle who owns what before you spend anything, because it changes the math. If you are going to end up rebuilding in order to leave, you may as well count that in now rather than pay to improve something you are about to give up.

What patching is genuinely good at

A great many sites people want to rebuild only need words changed.

Prices that are two years old. A service you no longer offer still listed on the front page. Hours that were right before you changed them. A staff member who left. A contact form pointing at an email address that is dead. Every one of those is an afternoon at most, and none of them are a reason to start again.

The same goes for photographs. Swapping tired stock images for pictures of your own vans, your own work and your own face will change how a site feels more than a new layout will, and it costs nothing but the walk around with a phone.

If your list is mostly this, the correct advice is to spend two evenings on the content and keep the site you have. You do not need to pay anyone to redesign it.

Rebuilding for the wrong reason

There are three reasons that come up a lot and none of them hold up on their own.

Somebody told you it looked old. Fashions in websites move faster than customers do, and the person who called you about it usually sells rebuilds.

You are not showing up on Google. That is often a listings and reviews problem rather than a site problem, and a new site with the same content will not move it by itself.

You are bored of it. That is a real feeling and a bad reason to spend money. You look at your site far more than any customer ever will.

Run through this before you decide

If you answer no to most of these, you are looking at a patch job, not a rebuild.

• Can somebody change the text and the phone number today, without a specialist
• Does the inquiry form arrive in an inbox you actually read
• Does the site work properly on your own phone, one-handed
• Is the software it sits on still getting security updates
• Do you own the domain and the site outright, and could you move both
• Are the photographs your own work rather than stock
• Are the hours, prices and service area on it still true
• Would a customer find your number in five seconds

Questions people ask

How often should a website be rebuilt?

There is no interval. A site that still loads fast, works on a phone and can be edited does not need replacing because a number of years have passed.

Is it cheaper to fix a website or rebuild it?

Fixing is cheaper right up until the point where nobody can get into the site, or the software under it is out of support. After that, every fix costs more than the last one.

Can I keep my content if I rebuild?

Usually yes, and you should. The words, the photographs and the page addresses are worth carrying across, and keeping the old addresses working matters more than most people are told.

Will a new website get me higher on Google?

Not on its own. Speed, working pages and a phone-friendly layout all help, but if the underlying problem is your listing or your reviews, a new site will not touch it.

What does a rebuild cost?

A Carverpoint build is $1,450, once, and you own it. Other people price it differently, and the figure matters less than what is included and what happens afterwards.

Should I rebuild before or after the busy season?

After. A rebuild involves a week or two of things being changed and checked, and you want to be free to look at drafts rather than doing it from a van.