Redesign or repair? How to tell which your site needs
Not every tired website needs starting again. Some need a few weeks of focused repair; some are past it. A few questions usually make the answer obvious.
- Nº
- 02
- Published
- Read
- 2 min
- Category
- Redesign
- Written by
- Revylio
When a website stops working for a business, the instinct is to start again. Sometimes that is right. Often it is the expensive answer to a problem that a few targeted fixes would solve.
Signs it needs repair
A site is usually worth repairing when the structure is sound and the problems are specific:
- It is slow, but the slowness comes from a handful of heavy images or scripts.
- The content is out of date, but the pages are the right pages.
- It looks dated in places, such as the type or the photography, but the layout still makes sense.
- Enquiries come in, just not as many as they could.
All of these can be fixed on the site you have, in weeks rather than months.
Signs it needs a redesign
A redesign earns its cost when the problem is the foundation:
- The site cannot be edited without a developer, so it never is.
- It does not work properly on a phone, and fixing that means rebuilding every page.
- The business has changed, with new services or new customers, and the site describes the old one.
- It is built on a platform that is no longer maintained, which is a security problem waiting to happen.
Either way, measure first
Before deciding, find out what the site is actually doing: how fast it is, which pages people land on, where they leave, how many of them get in touch. The answer is often surprising, and it is much cheaper to learn it before the work starts than after.
