Redesign or Rebuild
You redesigned the site once, and six weeks later the numbers hadn’t moved.
The design probably wasn’t the problem. Here’s how to tell a redesign from a rebuild, and which one you actually need.
Four questions separate them, and you can answer all four before you talk to anybody.
The short answer
They’re different projects with different prices, and picking the wrong one is the expensive mistake in this category. Four questions separate them.
Sound familiar
You’re not even sure the design is the problem.
Leads are down, the site looks dated, and everyone assumed those two things were connected.
You paid for a redesign once, and six weeks later the numbers hadn’t moved.
The last site launched so slow that visitors bounced before it finished loading.
You can’t afford to spend on the wrong project and find out a year from now.
Before you spend a cent, it’s worth knowing what’s actually failing.
The failure this page exists to prevent
A redesign bought to fix a problem the design wasn’t causing.
It goes like this. Leads are down. The site looks dated. The two facts get connected, a redesign gets scoped, and six weeks later there’s a better-looking site with the same information architecture, the same content and the same conversion rate. Nothing was done badly. The wrong thing was fixed.
Before either project, get one sentence that names the failure and has a number in it. “Our three highest-intent pages take four clicks to reach from the homepage.” “Half the traffic lands on a blog post from 2019 with no route to anything we sell.” Those sentences point at the fix. “The site feels old” does not.
Which one is yours
A rebuild absorbs a redesign.
You don’t do both, and paying for a redesign twelve months before a rebuild is the sequence to avoid.
- The structure works and the surface is dated
- The platform can still do what you need for the next two years
- Most of the content survives, with edits rather than rewrites
- The measurable problem is at the point of action: people arrive, understand, and don’t act
- You’re working around the platform routinely rather than occasionally
- The content needs restructuring, not restyling, and there’s a real amount of it
- Search traffic is landing on the wrong pages, or on pages that shouldn’t exist
- Nobody can safely change the site without a developer
- The site has grown by accretion for years and nobody can describe its structure in a sentence
Neither, sometimes
Two cases where the answer is to spend less.
What we do either way
We start by finding what’s actually failing.
Working out which one you need is part of scoping, and you’re not billed for it. If the answer is that you need neither, we’ll say so.
What it costs
The same three tiers, starting at $3,500.
Set by how much has to be designed rather than assembled. Full detail on the pricing page, and the whole approach on websites.