Old site: fix it, or start again?
A site that is eight years old is not automatically a bad site. Plenty of them work perfectly well and only look tired.
The question is whether the bones are sound. These five checks take ten minutes and usually answer it.
The five checks
- Open it on your phone. If you have to pinch and drag to read it, that is not styling, that is the way it was built. Rebuild.
- Look at the address bar. No padlock and browsers are warning people off before they have read a word. Sometimes a certificate fixes it in an afternoon; sometimes it means the hosting is ancient.
- Time the front page. Over about four seconds on mobile data and most visitors have gone. Often it is one enormous photograph, which is a fix, not a rebuild.
- Can you change a phone number yourself? If nobody alive can edit it, everything else is academic.
- Read the front page out loud. If it says nothing your competitors could not say, the problem is the words and no amount of rebuilding fixes that.
When a tidy-up is enough
The site works on a phone, loads reasonably, and you can edit it — then you are looking at new photographs, rewritten text, current prices and a form that works. That is a day or two of work, not a project.
Do not let anybody talk you into a rebuild you do not need. A tidy-up on sound bones gets you most of the benefit for a fraction of the money.
When to start again
- It does not work properly on a phone.
- It runs on something nobody supports any more.
- Nobody has the login and the person who built it has disappeared.
- It has been quietly broken for a while and you did not notice.
- The business has changed and the site describes an old one.
The thing you must not lose
Keep the domain. Whatever you do, the address stays. Years of people knowing it, links pointing at it and Google trusting it all sit on that name, and none of it moves with you if you change it.
If the new site puts pages at new addresses, every old address needs to point at its replacement. This is the single most common way a rebuild loses a firm its search traffic, and it is entirely avoidable.
Common questions
Will I lose my Google position if I rebuild?
Not if the domain stays the same and the old addresses are redirected. Expect a wobble for a few weeks while Google recrawls, then back to where you were, usually better because the new site is faster. Change the domain as well and it is a much bigger job.
The person who built it has vanished. Can I still keep the domain?
Usually yes, but check whose name it is registered in first — a WHOIS lookup tells you. If it is in theirs, sorting that out is the first job, before anything else, because everything depends on it.
Can I keep my old words and photos?
Yes, and often you should — you paid for them and they describe your business. A rebuild that keeps the content and changes everything else is the cheapest kind.
How do I know if it works on a phone?
Open it on your own phone on mobile data, not on the wifi at home. Then ask someone who has never seen it to find your phone number. Watch what they do rather than asking what they think.
Want to see what yours would look like?
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