Often neither. Keep your website if it’s fast on a phone, turns up in local searches, works with a thumb and says plainly what you do; redesign or replace it if nobody can change it, it’s slow at the foundations, it’s broken on a phone, or it runs on software nobody has updated in years.
Plenty of websites that get replaced only needed one or two things fixed, and the owner was told otherwise by somebody who sells websites.
Start with the two things that cost you money
A website earns its keep by being found and by loading; almost everything else is decoration.
Search for what you do plus your town, in a private window so the results aren’t tuned to you. If you’re not on the first page, that’s the first problem to fix, and a new website alone won’t solve it.
Then run your site through Google’s speed test and read the mobile score: 90 or better is good. On Google’s own research, a site that takes more than three seconds to load on a phone loses about half its visitors, and none of them tell you they left.
“It looks a bit dated” is the weakest reason on its own
It’s the reason most people give, and a plain site that loads fast and says what you do will out-earn a handsome one that takes six seconds.
The exception is a site that looks abandoned, because that reads as closed. A copyright date from four years ago, photos of premises you’ve moved out of, a phone number that isn’t yours any more: that costs enquiries, and fixing it is usually an afternoon’s work, not a rebuild.
Check who owns your domain and your logins
Who can log in to your website, and whose name is the domain registered in? Many owners don’t know, because whoever set it up moved on, or it was a mate’s nephew.
The domain matters more than the website: a site can be rebuilt in a few weeks, but a lapsed domain that somebody else picks up is gone, along with every business card and email address pointing at it.
When a redesign or a new site is the right call
- Nobody can change it. If updating your prices means finding someone, waiting a week and paying by the hour, you’ll stop bothering, and the site goes stale.
- It’s slow at the foundations. A heavy site can be tuned, but only so far: if it’s scoring in the 50s, tidying won’t get it to 90.
- It doesn’t work on a phone at all: a menu that won’t open, text you have to pinch at, a form you can’t fill in with a thumb. Looking a bit squashed doesn’t count.
- It runs on software nobody has updated in years. That’s a security problem: old, unpatched software is how a site ends up sending its customers to dodgy pages.
- You’d rather not give out the address, or you apologise when you do, and that costs you something no bill shows.
When it isn’t
If your site is quick on a phone, easy to find and clear about what you do, leave it alone and spend the money where it’ll do more.
For most local businesses that’s the Google Business Profile: claimed, filled in, with real photos and a few reviews. After that, clearer wording and fresh photos on the site you have often do more than a rebuild.
What a redesign costs
A full redesign, with a new look and the pages and words reworked, is priced much like a new build: $2,000 to $8,000 plus GST from a freelancer or small studio, and more from an agency. A refresh that keeps your pages and swaps the photos and some of the wording is a few hours at the going hourly rate, which often comes to a few hundred dollars.
On a monthly plan, ask whether a redesign is in the fee. On ours it is: every three years you can have the site redesigned at no extra cost, at your plan’s page count, or keep the one you have if it’s still doing its job.
What a new site has to beat
If you replace it, ask for the speed score of your current site and of the new one, in writing. A better-looking site that loads slower is a downgrade you’ve paid for, and what makes a site look impressive is often what makes it heavy.
Check yours before you spend anything
Run the free report on your site. Google scores it out of 100, the report says in plain English what’s slowing it down, and it usually arrives within five minutes. A lot of sites come back fine. If yours does, you’ve saved a few thousand dollars, and we’ll say so.