What we check before quoting a website rebuild
A redesign is often the second-best answer. These are the five things we check before quoting one — and the cheaper fixes they usually reveal.
Most rebuild conversations start in the wrong place: the look. A site feels dated, someone has seen a competitor's homepage, and the brief becomes "make it like that but better". Before we quote anything, we try to find out whether the site is actually the problem.
This is the order we work in.
1. Where the traffic comes from
Analytics first, because it changes the answer. A site getting twenty thousand visits a month from a mix of branded and non-branded search is a different job from one getting three hundred visits a month, almost all of them from people who already knew the business name. In the second case a redesign usually produces a better-looking site with the same three hundred visits.
We look at which pages bring people in, which pages they leave from, and whether they land on a page that answers their question or on one that assumes they already know what you sell.
2. What the enquiries actually look like
Form submissions and phone calls are the only honest measure of whether a site works. We read a sample of them and check which pages the person saw first. It is common to find that one page — a single service page, a location page, a pricing page — produces most of the good enquiries while everything else is decoration.
If that page is already doing the work, a redesign's job is not to reinvent it. It is to give people more routes to reach it.
3. Whether the problem is content, not design
A lot of sites fail because the pages do not say enough. Services are listed in three-word phrases, nobody explains who the service is for, and the two questions every buyer has go unanswered: roughly what will this cost, and what happens after I get in touch.
No amount of layout work fixes that. It needs someone to sit down and write, which is slower and less visible than a new design, and more valuable.
4. The technical situation
Then the dull part. Is the site fast on a phone? Can it be crawled? Is anything important rendered by JavaScript that does not run? Are there four hundred pages left over from an abandoned product catalogue? Do redirects run three hops deep?
These decide whether the job is a build or a build plus a rescue, and they move the cost more than the design does.
5. Who has to edit it afterwards
Last question: who inherits the thing. If one person updates content twice a year, a lightweight editing setup is enough. If four people add pages weekly, the content model and the editor matter more than the animation on the homepage.
We have watched businesses pay for a beautiful site they cannot change. It ends with a developer on retainer for text edits, which is the worst of both arrangements.
What we say at the end
Sometimes the answer is a rebuild. Often it is something smaller and cheaper: fix the speed, rewrite six pages, sort the navigation, add the pricing page everyone keeps asking for. We are not against being paid to build a new site — we would just rather it be the right answer.
If you are being quoted for a rebuild and nobody has asked about your analytics, your enquiries, or who updates the site afterwards, that is worth noticing.