Redesign or start again? How to tell what your website needs
Whether you need a website redesign or a new website comes down to what the current site still does for you. If the pages people find you through still describe your business and still bring visits, redesign it and keep them. If the site describes a business you no longer run, or nobody can log in to it, start again. With us a redesign starts from £900, before VAT, and a new five-page site from £800.
That second figure surprises owners who expect the redesign to be the cheap option. With us it starts a little above a Starter website and below a Business one. A redesign keeps your old content and your old addresses, so someone has to go through every page, decide what stays, move it across and point each old link at its new home. A new build starts from a blank page and skips that work. You pay for a redesign because of what it keeps, which only makes sense when something is worth keeping.
A redesign suits a site that works underneath and shows its age on top. Picture a joiner whose site went up eight years ago. It has thirty pages, and the one about oak staircases has come up in local searches for years and still brings in a few enquiries a month. On a phone the same site is hard work. The text is tiny, the gallery takes an age to load, and the phone number sits in the footer.
Starting fresh would cost the joiner that staircase page, along with an address Google has known for years. Our first question in a case like this is which pages people arrive on. We keep those at the same address where we can, rewrite the words that have gone stale, and redirect anything that has to move, so a link someone saved long ago still lands somewhere useful. Everything else gets the new design, a layout made for a phone and photos taken this decade.
Start again when there is little to keep. The usual sign is that the business has moved on and the site has not: the café that now opens for evening dining, or the electrician who has dropped domestic work for commercial jobs. Rewriting every page of a site amounts to a new site, and a new build costs less than a redesign that changes everything.
Access is the other sign. A common case is a site on a builder account that a former employee opened, or on software nobody has updated in years that breaks when anyone touches it. If you cannot get in, or getting in stops the contact form working, a redesign turns into a rebuild anyway. Start again, and this time make sure the domain is registered in your name. With us the domain, the content and the code are yours from day one.
Sometimes neither project is right. A site can look fine and open quickly while the phone stays quiet, and then the cause may be a missing button or a Google profile nobody has touched in a year. A few hours of fixes will do more there than a new design, and we would say so before quoting for anything bigger.
Starting prices, UK, before VAT
Website redesign
from£900
Keep what works, fix what loses you enquiries, look current again.
Starter website
from£800
Up to 5 pages. The essentials, built to bring in enquiries.
Business website
from£1,300
5–10 pages, with an editor so you can change the words and photos yourself. Our most common build.
Our rule of thumb is to redesign when more than half of the pages people land on are worth keeping, and to start again when you would rewrite most of it anyway or cannot get into it. Send us the address and we will look at the site as a customer would, then tell you which side of that line it falls on.
Written by Maksym Gavrylenko · Published