Do You Need a New Website, or Just a Fix?

A fair few of the enquiries that land in my inbox open the same way. Our website is a bit tired, we think we need a new one, what would that cost. Sometimes they are right. Quite often they are not, and I end up telling somebody in Hull that they do not need to spend four figures on a rebuild when a day of work would sort out the thing that is actually bothering them.

That is a slightly odd sales pitch for a web developer to make, so let me explain how I work it out.

Start with what is actually wrong

Almost nobody rings up because their website is objectively bad. They ring up because of a specific irritation, and the phrase a bit dated is doing a lot of work covering it up. So the first question I ask is what happened recently that made you pick up the phone.

The answers cluster into about five things. It looks wrong on a phone. It is slow. Nobody can find it on Google. The person who used to update it has left. Or the business has changed and the site is describing a company that no longer exists.

The first four are usually fixable. The fifth almost never is, and that is the one where I say yes, start again.

The problems that are a fix, not a rebuild

Here is where I would spend a day rather than a project:

• It looks wrong on phones. If the site is on a reasonably modern theme, this is usually a handful of layout problems rather than a structural fault. Worth checking before assuming the worst.

• It is slow. Slowness is nearly always a small number of specific causes: enormous images, a stack of things loading that nobody uses, cheap hosting. None of those need a new site. I have written up why WordPress sites go slow and the plugin count question separately.

• You cannot edit it. Sometimes the site is fine and the editing setup was just never explained to anybody. A morning with whoever is going to be updating it fixes more of these than you would think.

• The content is out of date. That is a writing job. A new website with the same old words on it is a very expensive way to change nothing.

The problems that really are a rebuild

And here is where I stop trying to talk you out of it:

• The business has moved on. New services, a different type of customer, a different name. The structure of the site is wrong, not the styling, and no amount of tidying fixes a structure.

• It cannot be updated safely. Some sites are so far behind on their platform that touching one thing breaks two others. At that point every fix costs more than the last one and you are renting a problem.

• You do not control it. If the login, the domain or the files sit with somebody who no longer answers emails, you are not maintaining a website, you are hoping. Getting control back is worth doing even if nothing else changes.

• It is on a builder you have outgrown. That is a specific job with a specific risk attached, which is why I wrote moving off a website builder without losing your SEO.

The test I actually use

Strip out everything cosmetic and ask one question. If the site looked exactly the same tomorrow but the thing that annoys you was gone, would you be happy?

If the answer is yes, you want a fix. If the answer is no, and it is really the whole shape of the thing that is wrong, you want a rebuild. Most people know which one it is the moment the question is put that plainly, they just have not been asked it.

What a fix costs versus what a rebuild costs

I am not going to quote numbers here, because they would be wrong for your site and I would rather look at it first. What I will say is that the two sit in genuinely different brackets, which is exactly why the question is worth taking seriously rather than defaulting to the bigger job.

A fix is usually scoped in hours and finished the same week. A rebuild is a project with content, structure, decisions and a launch in it. Both are fine. Paying for the second when you needed the first is not.

If you want to see how I put a number on either, I have written up how I quote a website and why it depends is an honest answer rather than a dodge.

Why you might not get this answer elsewhere

Being straight about it: a rebuild is a bigger invoice than a fix. If you ask somebody whose business model is building websites whether you need a new website, you should expect the answer to lean one way.

I work direct and on my own, which means my week is not built around filling a pipeline of big projects. A day of fixing something for a Hull business who then stays with me for years is a perfectly good week. That is not me being noble, it is just how a one person operation actually works out over time.

If you are not sure

Genuinely, just ask. I do a free thirty minute surgery where you show me the site, tell me what is annoying you, and I tell you which of the two it is. No slides and no proposal at the end unless you want one. Plenty of those calls end with me saying you do not need me yet, which is a fine outcome.

If that would be useful, get in touch and we will find half an hour.