When does your website need replacing?
Not every dated site needs replacing, and not every good-looking site is still good enough. Six signals that make the difference, and when a refresh is enough.
Most people call about a new website because they no longer like the look of the old one. That is rarely the best reason, and rarely the real one. Below are the signals I would go on, ordered by how much they cost you for as long as you do nothing.
1. You cannot change anything yourself
Every text edit goes through someone else, or through an admin screen nobody dares touch. The result is not that your site is wrong, but that it stands still: last year's prices, a filled vacancy, a service you no longer offer. That costs you enquiries without you noticing.
2. It loads slowly on a phone
Test it yourself on mobile data, not on the office wifi. If it takes more than three seconds before anything appears, part of your visitors leave before your site has even loaded. Speed is also a ranking factor, so you pay twice.
3. The technology underneath is no longer maintained
An expired certificate, plugins years behind, a CMS version that no longer gets security updates. This is the only point on this list that can turn from annoying into expensive overnight. See maintenance and support for what keeping up actually means.
4. The site no longer matches what you do
When it was built you had two services and one audience. By now you do something else, or something extra, and it does not fit the structure put around it back then. You notice this in the enquiries: people call about the wrong thing, or they do not call.
5. Visitors arrive, enquiries do not
This is the most expensive signal, because you are already paying for the traffic. Usually it is not the design but the build-up: nowhere does one sentence say what you do and for whom, there is no clear next step, or the form asks for ten fields where three would do.
6. You need something that does not fit
A quote calculation, an integration with your admin, clients who want to log in. As soon as your site has to do more than display, it collides with a foundation not built for it. Then you are not talking about a new website but about software or a client portal.
When a refresh is enough
Replacing is not always the answer. If your site runs on a foundation that is still maintained, is fast enough and you can edit it yourself, it is usually cheaper to fix the structure and the copy than to rebuild everything.
- Only the design is dated: refresh it.
- The copy does not convince: rewrite, do not rebuild.
- Slow but technically current: optimise first.
- No more updates, no self-management, no room to grow: replace.
The question is not whether your site is dated, but whether it is costing you something. Those are two different things.
What you take with you to a new site
If you do replace, do not throw away what works. Your existing positions in Google are traffic you built up; they only move along when every old URL gets a redirect to the right new page. It is the step most often skipped and the one that costs the most when you skip it. How the rest of the track runs is on website development.