This is the most frequent question we receive, and the best answer is often the most honest: it depends on what’s wrong – and most often that is unknown until someone takes the time to look and evaluate.
A rebuild is often worth considering when substantial structural issues exist with the website. Examples may include the website is not mobile friendly, the development platform and/or infrastructure is no longer supported, and/or the website will not support the business operations (i.e. the ability to accept online bookings, establish an online store, a member portal). If your site was built >5-6 years ago, it’s a good bet that a rebuild is the best course of action as the resources available to support website development have advanced greatly since that time and attempting to bring that site up to modern standards can easily create more issues.
However, a rebuild is not always warranted. If the basic structure of the website works, then the issues are usually isolated to performance issues stemming from one or a few of the following: slow page loads, bad navigation, or an obscured contact form. Each of these issues should drive a focus on improvements to the existing website constructs.
I’d check page speed first, as it affects everything else. Mobile users will leave your site after and before viewing design, content, CTA’s if your page takes more than 5 seconds to load. It is possible good content on a page is futile if users have no reason to stick around to view it. You can eliminate the issues of long page load times with optimized images as well as deleting unnecessary themes that contribute to page bloat.
The next function I’d evaluate is how users navigate your site. Users need to be able to access all of your site’s functions (e.g. contact and pricing) within a few clicks from any page on your site. If not, that’s a structure issue that is best resolved by modifying your navigation and/or internal links.
Last is your calls to action. A site can look great but may still be subpar if there is no clear direction on what you want your users to do next. This can be remedied via the modification or addition of buttons on site pages.
If you’re evaluating this for your site, the proper starting point should not be wondering what the site would look like if you were to completely redo the site, but instead should focus on what are the issues that the current site has. This is a smaller, less costly evaluation to conduct and may be beneficial to modify the current site to avoid a complete rebuild.
Send your site our way and we can provide the necessary feedback.