"We need a new website" is one of the most expensive sentences in a small business. Sometimes it is true. Often the real problem is smaller, cheaper and quicker to fix, and a full redesign would spend months and a lot of money arriving at the same result in a new coat of paint.
These five questions help you tell the difference. Answer them before you ask anyone for a quote.
1. Do visitors understand what you do?
Show the home page to someone who does not know the business, for five seconds, and ask what the company does and who it is for.
If they get it wrong, the problem is the message. That is a writing and ordering problem. It can usually be fixed in days, on the existing design, by rewriting the headline, the opening paragraph and the first call to action.
A redesign does not fix a message. It gives an unclear message better typography.
2. Can people find what they came for?
Pick the three things a visitor most often wants: a price, a service, a way to get in touch. Count the clicks from the home page to each.
If it takes more than two, or people use the search box because the navigation does not work, the problem is structure. Structure problems are about which pages exist, what they are called and how they link together. That is information architecture. It is solved on paper before anyone opens a design tool, and it is a good reason to rebuild if the current page tree cannot be reshaped.
3. Is the site slow, broken or hard to change?
Check three things:
- Does it load fast on a mid-range phone? Run PageSpeed Insights on your key pages.
- Does it work properly on a phone, with no sideways scrolling and tappable buttons?
- Can the people who own it change a page without calling a developer?
If the answer to any of these is no, the problem is the build. A faulty or inflexible foundation is the strongest reason to rebuild, because no amount of visual polish fixes a page that takes eight seconds to appear or a menu that breaks on phones.
4. Is the content out of date or missing?
Look at what the site says. Does it describe what you sell today? Are there services you no longer offer, or ones you do offer that are missing? Are the case studies recent?
If so, the problem is content. New content often requires a new structure to hold it, but not necessarily a new visual design. Writing and organising the content is the longest part of any redesign, so doing it first is rarely wasted.
5. Has the business changed?
A site is a description of a business. If you have changed who you serve, what you charge, how you work or how big you are, the site describes a company that no longer exists. That is a legitimate reason to redesign, because the message, structure and content all need to change together.
If the business is the same and the site simply looks older, you probably need a fix, not a redesign.
What each answer points to
- Message unclear: rewrite the first screen and the page order. Days of work.
- Structure confusing: redraw the page tree and navigation. Often done on the existing design.
- Build is the problem: rebuild, ideally keeping the content you have.
- Content is stale or missing: write and reorganise it, then decide if the design still holds it.
- The business has changed: redesign, starting with the message.
- None of these: your site may be fine. Look at how people arrive and what they do next.
How to decide what to do first
Start with the cheapest fix that could be wrong. Rewrite the headline and the first action, change the navigation labels, speed up the heaviest page. Measure for a few weeks. If enquiries or a clear measure of success do not move, then you have good evidence that the deeper problem is structural, and a redesign has a defined job to do.
A redesign with a defined job is a project. A redesign because the site "feels old" is a gamble.