Rebuild a website when it has stopped working, not when you have stopped liking it.

The signals you can check

These are not judgements. They are tests you can run now, one at a time, and each of them answers without asking your taste.

Try changing an opening hour, or a price, yourself. If doing it means messaging somebody and waiting for a reply, the first signal is already there: the site cannot be edited by the people who work in the business. Start with this one: a site nobody can correct ends up publishing things that have stopped being true.

Then send yourself a message through the site’s own contact form, from a phone, and wait. If it never arrives, or it lands in a mailbox nobody opens any more, the contact path is broken: the page invites people to write and what they write does not reach anybody. While you are there, compare the telephone number and the email address the site publishes with the ones you actually answer.

The third test is done standing up, one-handed. Open whichever page matters most, usually prices or services, and read it without zooming and without dragging the page sideways. If you have to, the site was not built for the screen it is nearly always read on. That is not a question of style: it is the page refusing to be read.

The last test is the dull one and the useful one. Read the site line by line and mark everything that is no longer true: hours, the closing day, services you stopped offering, people who no longer work with you, a price left over from two price lists ago. If the list is long, you are already holding the scope of what needs redoing, and a list instead of an impression.

How it looks is not a test

The signal that sends most people to ask for a quote is also the one that, on its own, settles nothing.

Looking dated is not a fault you can measure. Web fashions keep turning over and your site will be behind them for as long as it exists: by that criterion the moment to rebuild is always now, and it will be now again at the next one. The site you have may have been built well for what was needed then. Work done for another period is not work done badly.

There is something true inside the impression, though, and it is worth separating out. A site can look old because the design is old, or because it looks abandoned. The tests above tell those two apart. A site that gets updated, that answers and that tells the truth can carry a design from a few years ago and still be doing what it was built for.

Abandonment shows in what the site says, not in how it is drawn, and that is a content problem before it is a design one.

A competitor who has just rebuilt theirs is not a reason, and neither is the visitor who tells you it ought to look more modern. If the tests turn up nothing, the answer is that the site does not need rebuilding yet.

If they turn up one thing, it can usually be put right inside the structure you already have: correcting the facts, repairing the contact path or replacing the photographs are smaller pieces of work than a rebuild, and they are the ones to try first.

The parts that carry over

Rebuilding a site does not mean throwing all of it away. It means deciding what stays, and rebuilding the rest around the questions the site has to answer.

The accounts that are in your business’s name carry over, and they stay yours: the domain, the hosting, the mailboxes, the booking account and the analytics are yours before the rebuild and after it. So does the content that is still true, meaning the copy, the price list and the descriptions nobody needs to rewrite.

So do the photographs that are still usable, and the logo you already have, prepared for the new site. All of it is looked at before the quote rather than after it: what gets reused is the part you do not pay for twice.

The structure does not carry over. That is what a rebuild actually rebuilds: which pages exist, in what order they are read, what can be seen without hunting for it, and where each page leads.

Neither does the technical machinery of the previous site and its extensions, and neither does anything that lived inside a supplier’s account instead of yours. If your site is a subscription on somebody else’s platform, find out whose name the domain and the mailboxes stand in before anything else: where that answer is wrong, it is the first thing to put right, ahead of the site.

From there the work can be written down in full: we look at the site you have, we put in writing what is reused and what is rebuilt, and the scope is approved before anything starts. If the check says a small piece of work is enough, that is what we propose. A rebuild follows from the problems you found, not from a date.