Do you need a new website, or just a redesign?

You already suspect your website is the problem. Enquiries are flat, it takes a developer and a week to change a headline, and it looks nothing like the brand you have become. The question is whether that calls for a new site, a redesign on the same foundations, or a few weeks of conversion work on the pages that matter.

Three different jobs people call “a new website”

A rebuild replaces the platform and the code. New stack, new templates, usually new URLs, data migrated across. Weeks of work and the only option that fixes structural problems.

A redesign keeps the platform and replaces the surface: templates, navigation, imagery, copy. Same URLs, same CMS, same hosting. Faster and considerably cheaper.

A CRO pass changes almost nothing visually and a lot commercially: the offer, the headline, the form, the proof, the checkout. Days to weeks, and the only one of the three that can be tested rather than argued about.

Price all three against the same goal before you choose. “More enquiries next quarter” is often best served by the third.

Symptoms that justify a rebuild

These are structural. No amount of design work touches them.

A platform you cannot hire for. A bespoke PHP site, an abandoned theme framework, a page builder whose licence lapsed, or a custom CMS built by someone unreachable. If every small change needs the one person who understands it, you are paying rent on a hostage situation.

Speed you cannot fix. Google’s Core Web Vitals thresholds are an LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds and CLS under 0.1. Run your own pages through PageSpeed Insights on mobile. If the cause is bloated page-builder markup, a stack of plugins each injecting its own scripts, or render-blocking theme CSS you cannot edit, the ceiling is the platform. If it is oversized images, no caching and too many third-party tags, that is fixable in place, and how to make a Shopify store load fast covers the same diagnosis on commerce.

No CMS control. If your marketing team cannot publish a page, add a section or change a price without a developer, your site will stay out of date whatever it looks like.

A mobile layout you cannot reach. Not “it looks cramped” but genuinely unreachable: a fixed-width theme, absolute positioning throughout, or a separate mobile site drifting out of sync with the desktop one.

Security and maintenance debt. An unsupported CMS version, plugins no longer updated, a PHP version past end of life, no backups, no staging environment. This is a breach waiting to happen and it is not a design conversation.

The platform is wrong for the business. Selling seriously on a brochure site with a bolted-on cart, or running a growing store on a stack that fights every integration. Moving platform is the fix, and what a WooCommerce to Shopify migration involves sets out the work, as does this move from Wix and Squarespace onto Shopify.

Symptoms a redesign or a CRO pass fixes more cheaply

It looks dated. A new template, a current type and colour system, and better photography. Your URLs, content and rankings stay exactly where they are.

The copy does not say what you do. This is a writing problem. New words on existing pages will outperform the same vague words in a prettier frame, every time.

Visitors arrive and do not convert. Work the flow: one clear action per page, a shorter form, proof near the ask, pricing visible, trust signals at the point of hesitation. Landing pages and CRO exist for exactly this, and it is testable, which a rebuild is not.

Paid traffic lands on the wrong page. Sending campaign clicks to a homepage wastes them. Build dedicated campaign pages and leave the site alone. If that sounds familiar, why Meta ads get clicks but no sales is the related read.

One section is the problem. A single ugly product template, a broken blog archive or a checkout step losing people is a repair, not a rebuild. We audited and fixed exactly that scope in this Shopify speed audit and redesign.

Symptom to recommendation

Symptom	Likely cause	What we would recommend
Nobody can edit content without a developer	No usable CMS layer	Rebuild, or a headless CMS added to the existing front end
Mobile scores poorly and fixes do not stick	Theme or page-builder markup	Rebuild on a lean template
Pages look old but convert fine	Visual dating only	Redesign, keep URLs and copy
Traffic is healthy, enquiries are not	Offer, copy or flow	CRO pass on the top five pages
Plugins conflict after every update	Platform and plugin debt	Rebuild, and consolidate functionality
One template is broken	Isolated bug	Repair that template
Checkout abandonment is high	Checkout friction, trust, speed	CRO and speed work, not a rebuild
Running a real shop on a brochure site	Wrong platform	Rebuild on Shopify, or migrate
Site was hacked or runs end-of-life software	Security debt	Rebuild, and move hosting
Rankings have slid for two quarters	Content and technical SEO	Diagnose first; a rebuild will not fix it

That last row matters. Rebuilding a site because rankings fell usually makes things worse, because it adds migration risk to a problem that was about content, intent and links. How long SEO takes to show results is the honest frame for that decision.

What a rebuild actually risks

Rankings. The real danger, and nearly always self-inflicted through changed URLs, rewritten page copy and lost internal links.

Timeline. A brochure site is typically two to four weeks of build, and then content, approvals and migration. Expect the project to be longer than the build.

Cost of the second-order work. Tracking, forms, CRM connections, email templates, redirects and schema all have to be rebuilt too, and they are routinely left out of the first quote.

Trading disruption. Launching into your busiest month is a choice you will regret. Launch into a quiet one.

How to protect your rankings through a rebuild

1. Crawl the current site in full and export every URL that returns a 200.
2. Export your top pages by clicks and impressions from Search Console, 12 months, and treat them as untouchable.
3. Build a one-to-one URL map: old address to new address. Only point to the homepage where there is genuinely no equivalent page.
4. Keep the titles, H1s and body copy on those top pages. Restyle them, do not rewrite them.
5. Preserve internal links between them. Orphaning a ranking page is how rankings quietly vanish.
6. Rebuild structured data: organisation, breadcrumbs, product, article, local business, whichever applied before.
7. Keep staging behind noindex and a password, then check the live site is indexable on launch day. Shipping a noindex tag to production is the most common launch accident there is.
8. Implement the redirects as 301s before the DNS switch, and test a sample of 50 by hand.
9. Submit the new sitemap, then watch Search Console coverage, Core Web Vitals and top-page clicks weekly for eight weeks.
10. Keep paid campaigns on dedicated landing pages through the transition so lead flow does not depend on the migration.

A migration done this way holds. That is how products, customers, orders and a full blog archive moved across with redirects intact in the Chasin’ Unicorns migration.

When we tell people not to rebuild

We turn down rebuilds fairly often, and these are the usual reasons.

The site ranks and converts and the founder has simply grown bored of it. Rebuilding spends money to take on risk you do not need; a redesign gets the feeling you want without touching what works.

The budget covers the build but not the content. A new site with the old copy pasted in is a worse site. Spend the first third on the words.

Nothing has been tested yet. If you have never changed a headline or shortened a form, you do not yet know whether the template is the constraint.

The actual problem is traffic. A beautiful new site with no one on it converts nothing. Fix acquisition first, then the pages that receive it.

What this looks like when we do it

We start with a one-page recommendation that names which of the three jobs you need and what it will not fix. Sometimes that is a full build on WordPress, Webflow or a custom stack, sometimes a Shopify migration with the URL map agreed before anyone designs anything, and often it is two landing pages and a week of conversion work. The Shopify speed audit and redesign is a good example of the narrow version: audit first, prioritise the fixes with the biggest impact, change only what needed changing.

The decision in front of you

Go through the symptom table and mark your rows. If they cluster in the “rebuild” column, start the URL map before you start the design, and plan for three to six months before organic traffic has settled. If they cluster in presentation and conversion, do the cheaper work and keep your rankings. If you are honestly unsure, bring the site to the free audit: a strategist reviews it beforehand, and you keep a one-page plan saying which of the three we would do, whether or not you hire us.